A somber mood pervades Chabad-Lubavitch communities globally in the aftermath of Rabbi Zvi Kogan’s murder, allegedly carried out by Uzbekistan-based assassins working at Iran’s behest.
One message resonates: Devoted emissaries, operating thousands of centers worldwide, will persist in their mission, undeterred by this brutal act of violence.
See Chabad emissaries on page 2
Message from Chabad: ‘Fear is not an option’
Commentary by Tzvi
Freeman, Chabad.org
Rabbi Zvi Kogan worked tirelessly to grow Jewish life in the UAE. He was murdered by thugs. Why? Because they want Jews to be afraid. And it’s normal to be afraid.
But for the Jewish people today, fear is not an option. See Chabad’s message on page 2
Bibi: We’ll sock truce-breaking H’bollah
The IDF will respond “forcefully” to all violations of the ceasefire deal with Iranianbacked Hezbollah in Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Tuesday night. He said he was “totally committed” to the security and rehabilitation of Israel’s north-
For The Jewish Star Israel and the fight against antisemitism are not the only things Rep. Ritchie Torres has on his mind. Torres, whose Bronx district includes Riverdale, is one of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Congress. Now he’s defending New Yorkers against a criminal justice system some say is broken; in doing so, he’s set himself up to challenge Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2026.
Torres, a progressive gay Latino Democrat, this week attacked the “complicity of the State and City in the murder of three New Yorkers who were savagely stabbed to death in a homicidal rampage.”
The alleged killer is a 51-yearold homeless man with numerous
ern communities —and to blocking Iran.
“I am determined to do anything needed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said.
As for Hezbollah, “We have pushed them decades back … taken out the organ-
encounters with law enforcement who was released from Rikers early despite having assaulted a corrections officer.
The New York Post featured Torres’ criticism on its cover on Monday (photo).
Torres called Hochul “the new Joe Biden.” He said she’s “a Democratic incumbent who is less popular in New York than Donald Trump” and may lose to a Republican in 2026, “an outcome not seen in 30 years.”
“Waiting until it’s too late gave us a Republican President in 2024 and could give us a Republican governor in 2026,” he added.
“With few exceptions, nowhere was there a greater swing toward Donald Trump than in New York, which
ization’s top leadership … destroyed most of their rockets and missiles … killed thousands of terrorists and we demolished their underground terror infrastructure abutting our border, infrastructure they had been building for years.”
Thousands of Israelis on mullah’s hit lists
By Yoav Limor, Israel Hayom
Iranian intelligence services have assembled comprehensive profiles of thousands of Israelis, identifying them as potential targets in both domestic and international operations, security sources reveal. The scope of targeting encompasses current and former defense officials, academics and scientists, Israel Hayom has learned.
Several hundred individuals have been designated “high-risk” targets, with some receiving explicit threats.
This systematic campaign, sustained for more than a decade, represents Iran’s calculated response to a series of assassinations of Iranian scientists and officials attributed to the Mossad and Israel. Tehran has retaliated by establishing terror cells across multiple countries, seeking to strike Israelis residing in or traveling to these locations.
Planned attacks have been uncovered in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Thailand, and several Western European nations. Most were prevented through timely intelligence sharing between Israel and local security agencies, resulting in real-time arrests of Iranian terror cells and operatives across multiple jurisdictions.
See Mullah’s hit lists on page 4
was a vote of no confidence in the leadership of New York state,” he said.
The largest swing of any county in New York towards Trump occurred in Torres’ Bronx county, driven by a significant shift towards Republicans among Latino voters.
A poll in September showed that Hochul had just a 34% job approval rating, and in 2022 she defeated then-congressman Lee Zeldin by just 6 percentage points, the worst performance by a Democrat in a statewide race in two decades.
Though Torres has not directly criticized New York City Mayor Eric Adams by name in the way that he has called out Hochul, pundits suggested Torres could also
make a run for Gracie Mansion in the 2025 election as Adams fights federal bribery charges.
At a press conference on Monday, Hochul said “it’s more fun to have a big headline, something splashy, but there’s no substance behind it. … Look at the real record of what we’ve done. … We’ve come a hell of a long way from where we were when I took office three years ago.”
Asked if she was upset that Torries “is using this crime as sort of a springboard to a gubernatorial campaign,” she responded: “I actually don’t care what he’s doing.”
Since taking his seat in Congress in 2021, Torres, 36, has been widely lauded by the Jewish community for his vocal support.
Rabbi Zvi Kogan.
Chabad.org
FROM RESEARCH TO REALITY
Chabad emissaries…
Continued from page 1
“We are here to stay,” declares Rabbi Nechemia Wilhelm, a 30 year veteran emissary in Bangkok, Thailand. “Undoubtedly, Rabbi Kogan’s murder during his sacred work has deeply shaken us — both the profound loss and the sobering reality that such tragedy could strike anywhere demands our vigilance. Nevertheless, we remain steadfast.
“This commitment echoes across our global network of emissaries. Our mission never wavers. We bear responsibility as a sanctuary for Jews and Israelis … supporting those in distress, or offering space for prayer and religious observance.”
Head
FEATURING
PROFESSOR RACHEL SARIG
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2024 8:00 pm
The National Security Council’s extraordinary alert elevating Thailand’s threat level following Kogan’s murder reflects escalating concerns. Irani an attempts to target Jews and Israelis in Thailand have been repeatedly documented, with Thai po lice recently issuing a grave warning about threats to Israeli travelers.
“Our security operations run continuously, guided by an ‘open but secure’ policy,” Rabbi Wil helm said. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that ‘darkness is dispelled with light,’ and current chal lenges only strengthen our resolve to enhance our positive impact. This isn’t mere rhetoric — it’s our foundational principle.”
In Warsaw, where Poland’s relative security might invite complacency, Chabad emissary Rab bi Shalom Ber Stambler maintains unwavering vigilance. “Since the horrific attack on Simchat Torah, we’ve witnessed an alarming surge in an tisemitism, manifesting primarily through pro Pal estinian rhetoric that challenges Jewish existence in Israel,” explains Rabbi Stambler, who has dedi cated 19 years to his Warsaw mission alongside his wife and eight children.
“The recent vandalization of the Warsaw Ghet to Uprising memorial, a summer Molotov cocktail attack on a synagogue, and recurring incidents raise concerns. Poland’s apparent calm might breed false security, suggesting immunity from such threats,” the rabbi observes.
“Post–October 7, we’ve had constant police presence, and we’ve intensified security protocols – screening visitors, monitoring unexpected ar rivals, and enhancing protection during events or periods of heightened tension following develop
He recounts a telling incident. “During last Chanukah’s parliament menorah lighting, an tisemitic parliament member and far right lead er Grzegorz Braun extinguished our meno rah with a fire extinguisher, injuring those who intervened. One person required several days of hospitalization after attempting to prevent this act,” he says. “The Polish Parliament’s response proved exemplary — implementing maximum sanctions against the antisemitic member and hosting another candle lighting ceremony with senior officials two days later.
“However, this same parliament member’s sub sequent election to the European Parliament with substantial support signals a deeply troubling un dercurrent. The Amsterdam incident should serve as a crucial warning across Europe, though I fear European nations may not fully grasp the situa tion’s gravity. We remain hopeful nonetheless.”
Amsterdam’s Chabad community, no stranger to challenges, faces this latest tragedy with char acteristic resilience. “We share the profound grief of our fellow emissaries over the murder of our beloved Rabbi Kogan, may G d avenge his blood,” says Rabbi Akiva Camissar, Chabad emissary and leader of the Netherlands’ Israeli community.
“Despite this challenging year, we remain com mitted to our divinely appointed mission, follow ing the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s directive to increase light that dispels darkness. We’ll respond by in tensifying our Jewish activities, spreading Torah teachings, and acts of kindness.”
In Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, circumstances differ markedly.
“Our interfaith relationships, particularly with the Muslim community, remain positive. Nev ertheless, we maintain comprehensive security measures, coordinating closely with relevant au thorities to ensure our Jewish guests’ safety,” ex plains Rabbi Israel Uzan, Chabad’s Abuja emissary. Their work has fostered meaningful interfaith bonds through various initiatives, including Rabbi Uzan’s humanitarian organization serving local residents.
message…
Not only the events of today, but every event of Jewish history can be told in two ways: As stuff that happened. Or as a chapter of a grand epic.
As stuff that happened, it’s all ugly. As a chapter of an epic, with patience to keep reading the story, everything points toward greatness.
And that is how we tell our story.
Take the story of Abraham. G‑d tells him to leave his home to go to a wonderful, promised land. He arrives there to find a famine. He teaches good ness and kindness, but has to chase away his own child, Ishmael. He argues for Sodom and Gomorrah only to see them exterminated the next morning. He commits the ultimate act of self surrender to G d to almost give away his only child, only to come home to find his beloved wife has died.
We don’t tell the story that way.
We tell the story of Abraham, our father, who stood up against the entire world. We are the stars in the sky that G‑d showed him would be his. We tell how his faithfulness has stood by us to preserve us for millennia. We speak of a man who changed the course of history, indeed, the man who made progress a possibility, so that all the goodness there is today is on his account.
Our father, Abraham, had the most magnificent life of any man in history. Because we tell his life story not as a thing that happened in the past, but as a living heart beating within the present.
The same with the stories of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. The same with Moses and the Exodus. The same with every event upon the long and arduous journey of our people. At any point in time, it is both horridly ugly and a magnificent epic of resil ience that could only be divine.
Was there purpose to Zvi Kogan’s life? Only the most sordid nihilist could believe otherwise. It was a beautiful life. It was filled with meaning. It was an open miracle.
“When a part of your body is cut off,” Zvi’s fa
ther said at his son’s funeral, “it hurts. We just had part of our souls cut off. It’s painful. We are small people and do not understand G‑d’s ways. We must fill in that which is missing. We must do like Zvi. Look for what others need. Maybe this is what G‑d wants from us now.”
Is there purpose and meaning to the tragedy of his murder? To the horrors we have experienced over the last thirteen and a half months? To the unimaginable trials of the hostages? To the lives of over 800 heroes whose lives were cut short? To the madness of terrorists posing as protestors on campus and terrorists posing as terrorists let loose on the streets of Amsterdam and Montreal? To the open, unbridled bigotry of international agencies who break their own rules out of their savage lust for hatred?
We must have faith, because reason fails us.
As much as we cannot understand how such raw evil could have meaning, that is how much we cannot fathom how good the place it leads us must be.
And indeed, there are many good things to speak of. Tremendous things lie just short of hand’s reach. Only one more stretch forward.
Jewish people have not been so inspired in cen turies, perhaps millennia. The Jewish nation has never been so courageous and powerful. Good and evil have never been so starkly juxtaposed. Evil sits at the verge of its own demise, digging its grave deeper every day. We have witnessed open miracles that exceed those of Elijah and Elishah.
Tremendous things lie just short of hand’s reach. Only one more stretch forward.
Creatures imprisoned within the granular mo ments of fleeting time upon Planet Earth can fear. For the stars shining in the heavens, fear does not exist.
Jew, walk proud. Walk tall. Fill in the void that Zvi Kogan left behind.
Tzvi Freeman is a senior editor at Chabad.org.
LADIES BRUNCH
Marilyn Wolowitz
MARIAM BODNER CHAIA FRISHMAN LAUREN ZUCKERMAN
GUEST SPEAKER: RABBI JOEY HABER
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15 9:45 am
Murray and Shapiro pack Israel’s largest auditorium
By David Isaac, JNS
Two giants of political conservatism, Douglas Murray and Ben Shapiro, starred at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center before a sold-out crowd of more than 3,000 in what might best be described as a mutual admiration society, with the crowd applauding its pro-Israel champions as they in turn voiced esteem for Israelis’ grit and fighting spirit.
“Thank you on behalf of Western civilization for fighting the fight the rest of the West should be fighting,” Shapiro told the audience at the Freedom of Zion conference.
He asked those with loved ones who had served in the Israel Defense Forces in the past year to stand up. Nearly all did.
“There are people here … who … put their bodies on the line defending civilization. I am merely a writer,” said Murray. “If I give you any encouragement, you should know that the encouragement you give me is 1,000-fold.”
Early reports pointed to an enormously successful event. the Jerusalem Post on Monday said that Shapiro-Murray was the hottest ticket in town, with fans “scrambling for scalped seats,” likening it to a Taylor Swift concert.
Murray and Shapiro are renowned in conservative circles. Shapiro, an American Jew, is host of a daily political podcast, and founder of media company the Daily Wire. He frequently speaks on college campuses and is the author of numerous books, including, “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans” and “The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.”
Murray, who is from the United Kingdom, first came to prominence with his 2017 book, “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam,” in which he warned that Europe could not sur-
vive mass Muslim migration and its loss of faith in its “beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy.”
An outspoken defender of Israel prior to the Hamas invasion, Murray ramped up his efforts in columns and TV appearances in its wake.
Asked, “At what point did you decide to stand in the line of fire for the State of Israel and the Jewish people?” Murray suggested that a good deal of it was due to his upbringing and the values he was taught, such as distinguishing between right and wrong.
Murray also said he felt it was wildly unjust how Israel is treated abroad, particularly since the Hamas invasion, which cast into sharp relief how the Jewish nation is “the only nation in the world which, when it gets attacked, then gets attacked again.” His connection to Israel has “become personal,” he confessed.
“When I read about something terrible happening here, it affects me personally, as if it’s family.”
Responding to a question about the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran, Murray said, “My hope is that whatever the Israeli military and political leadership can do, the endgame should be that the virus that has ruined Iran … is gone.”
In his speech to the conference, Shapiro stressed that the conflict Israel is fighting “is the tip of the spear in a civilizational battle.”
Shapiro lavished praise on Israel for the way it fought back after the tragedy of Oct. 7, noting that “a country that seemed to be fraying at every corner proved more durable and stronger than the social fabric of pretty much any other nation on the planet.”
He also offered constructive criticism, calling on Israel to free itself of unnecessary bureaucracy, calling that a relic of the country’s socialist past, to pave the way toward greater economic and military strength. And he called for all Israelis to take an equal share in military service, a reference to the hot-button issue in Israel of haredivJews refusing to serve.
Mullah’s hit lists…
Continued from page 1
The operation has seen significant expansion in recent years, propelled by Iran’s advancing cyber capabilities. This technological sophistication enables dualtrack operations: enhanced gathering of intelligence about Israeli targets and accelerated recruitment of operatives (who initially may be unaware of their handlers’ Iranian connection).
• • •
Iranian operatives have exploited vulnerabilities in databases, phones and computers to harvest comprehensive personal details of thousands of Israelis — including passport data, identification numbers, residential addresses, email accounts, mobile numbers, family information, employment details and social networks.
This intelligence enables precise tracking of targets’ movements and future plans, allowing Iran to identify optimal attack opportunities. Such surveillance methods, particularly mobile device infiltration, is believed to have been carried out by the Iranian cell that assassinated Chabad Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the UAE, whose body was discovered on Sunday.
Device compromise typically occurs through deceptively innocent text message links or calls from unknown numbers which, when engaged with, grant remote access to mobile devices and their stored data.
Iran has made direct contact with several targets, issuing explicit threats. Some received mock “birthday greetings” for themselves or family members, including ominous warnings about not reaching their next birthday.
• • •
Iran’s recruitment efforts have intensified markedly. The cell responsible for Kogan’s killing reportedly operated from
Uzbekistan, with similar cells using various nationalities believed to be active globally. Security forces recently arrested one such cell in Sri Lanka planning attacks against Israelis, and this week’s upgraded travel warning for Thailand likely reflects similar intelligence.
Particularly concerning is Iran’s successful large-scale recruitment within Israel itself. Recent weeks have exposed multiple cells recruited remotely, operating under Iranian direction for financial gain, to gather intelligence on security installations and specific individuals. Some received instructions to begin practical preparations for attacking Israeli targets. Arrests include Israeli Jews and Arabs, plus Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem.
The domestic targeting operation focuses on several hundred “high-risk” individuals, including current and former senior defense officials, academics across various fields, and scientists. All have received security agency warnings and instructions to maintain heightened vigilance while avoiding unnecessary international travel.
Intelligence assessments project Iran will escalate these efforts imminently, driven by mounting losses in the current war — both direct casualties and damage to its proxies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
While the Shin Bet and other security agencies have successfully thwarted Iranian attempts thus far, Tehran’s massive investment in personnel, funding and technology, combined with the discovered willingness of some Israelis to collaborate with Iranian handlers, creates potential for successful attacks both within Israel and abroad.
Yoav Limor is a veteran journalist and defense analyst.
Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘Not some colonial effort’
By Vita Fellig, JNS
For the first time in nearly a decade, Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts are on view in the United States in an exhibit of artifacts from the Israel Antiquities Authority, including some objects that have never been exhibited publicly before.
A sheet of the Great Psalms Scroll, from Qumran Cave 11, which dates to the first century of the Common Era and is written in square Hebrew script that remains in use today, is among the items that hasn’t been previously shown.
“The Israel Antiquities Authority is very strict in terms of its policies as to what can be exhibited, in what conditions and for how long and at the same time,” Joe Uziel, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls unit at the authority, told JNS.
Uziel is a curator of a traveling exhibit (through Sept. 2, 2025), which recently opened at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif.
“There is a story to be told in every exhibition,” he said. “The objects chosen aimed at bringing to light the period in which the scrolls were written,” particularly “the Second Temple Period, with a particular focus on different regional and chronological moments relating to that story.”
Highlights of the show, according to Uziel, are “never-exhibited-before finds along Jerusalem’s main pilgrimage road, fragments of the sunken boat found in the Sea of Galilee, finds from Masada and artifacts relating to the Roman conquest of the region in 70 CE”
One of the show’s unique aspects, he said, is its “focus on scientific breakthroughs made relating to Dead Sea Scrolls research, beginning with their initial discovery in 1947 and through to today.”
New technologies and approaches “are teaching us things about the scrolls that were never known before,” he said.
Uziel hopes that the public can gain a better
sense of Israel’s cultural history by visiting the exhibit. “In a period where we see the spread of claims relating to the connection between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, this exhibit presents tangible artifacts that substantiate this connection,” he told JNS.
“At the most basic level, I think you realize the rich cultural heritage of Israel’s past. Particularly in the Second Temple period, we are witness to finds that relate to the formation of identities that are still part of our world,” he said.
The California exhibit celebrates the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran, Jordan, in 1947. (The show was delayed two years due to the Covid pandemic.)
“It’s a profound honor to host the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Reagan Library,” David Trulio, CEO of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, stated. He added that the show is inspired by the former president’s faith.
“The Dead Sea Scrolls are foundational to the development of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” he stated. “President Reagan was deeply shaped by his faith, and we are proud to bring these ancient treasures to the public.”
The exhibit features about 200 artifacts from the Antiquities Authority, including the Magdala Stone (which contains the “earliest known synagogue images of the Temple menorah,” per the museum), ossuaries (burial receptacles) and Tyrian shekel coins.
Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Near Eastern and Judaic studies at New York University, told JNS that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest Jewish library to which we have access.
“The Dead Sea Scrolls are the remnants of an ancient library of a specific sect of Jews called the Essenes, that had a building complex near the caves of Qumran,” he said.
The Scrolls essentially divide into three categories, according to Schiffman.
The first grouping is “books that we know from the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible,” and the other two consist of Second Temple literature. The latter “would have been of interest or read by Jews in general, as well as the sectarian ideological material of this particular group,” he said.
The exhibit affirms the historical Jewish connection to ancient Israel, according to Schiffman, who has not seen the show.
“I can guarantee you 100% the exhibit is totally devoid of anything political and is about bringing people together to enjoy an ancient discovery,” he told JNS. “It’s an indisputable fact that there is a historical Jewish connection to the area, and this exhibit cements people’s understanding of what Israel is really all about and of the idea that Jews lived there in antiquity and is not some colonial effort.”
Schiffman noted that hosting an exhibit with these materials can have a positive effect on Jewish-Christian relations.
“An exhibit like this makes the point that Christianity starts out from a branch of Judaism,” he said. “This type of exhibit helps to make the point to people in a time of rising antisemitism that certainly antisemitism doesn’t make sense from a Christian point of view, a matter which for example, the pope has said over and over.”
“Here you see why — never mind that hate is a sin in general — but that Judaism is the basis of Christianity,” Schiffman added.
Sea of Galilee Boat on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif., on Nov. 22, 2024. Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation
WINE AND DINE
Loving my Scottish-Chanukah ‘keepin’ cakes’
Forget dieting during Chanukah! I’ll bake, serve and savor every morsel of my mother’s buttery cakes. For her, Chanukah was more than latkes, though she fried up dozens every night.
“Keepin’ cakes,” she called them. She was probably influenced by the extensive makeahead baking that Scots do in preparation of Hogmanay (the riotous Scottish New Year’s Eve celebration). Rich, buttery (and a different oil of sorts), and studded with dried fruits and spices, they were baked in advance, and tightly wrapped and stored.
The highlight for the first night of Chanukah was Whisky Fruit Cake. Forget the tasteless, shamefully lacquered fruitcake that appears every winter in stores throughout our nation. My mother’s version was baked six weeks earlier. The whisky-infused cake was crowned with a layer of marzipan, toasted, and again wrapped in whisky-soaked cheesecloth before storing in an airtight container. Unwrapped, each slice was moist, rich and aromatic with a kick. What else when it had been doused with Dad’s best single-malt whisky?
These “keepin’ cakes” won my mother the highest compliment: “a superb baker.” Friends and neighbors would drop in unannounced, sure of a welcoming pot of tea and a luscious variety of Jean Greenwald’s “keepin’cakes.”
At these tea times, my mother never failed to tell the story of the biblical Judith, who fed Holofernes, the enemy general, enormous quantities of cheese, then plied him with copious drafts of heavy red wine to quench his resulting thirst. As planned, he fell into a stupor so deep that she quickly beheaded him. Without their leader, the enemy fled, and Judith’s town was saved. Her bravery is said to have inspired Judah Maccabee and his followers to clean and rededicate the sacred Temple in the second century BCE.
Although my mother’s “keepin’ cake” custom originated many years ago, the bake and store-ahead method fits in admirably well with contemporary frantic schedules. Other than the Whisky Fruit Cake, these desserts — all rich in butter — can be stored three to four days before serving. Wrap and store in a cool, dry place; the day of serving, bring to room temperature. All of these cakes may be frozen, removed from the
freezer about four to six hours before serving. Ingredient lists are simple. You probably have most of them in the house, such as eggs, sugar, butter and flour. A list of ingredients to buy and cook’s tips are included with each recipe.
Glacé Cherry Loaf (Dairy)
Serves 10 to 12
Cook’s Tips:
•Cut cherries in halves with kitchen scissors. •Toss with 2 teaspoons flour to avoid sticking and dropping to bottom of cake. •In a pinch, use vanilla extract instead of almond.
To buy: Glacé cherries, almond extract.
• 1 cup glacé cherries, halved
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1-3/4 sticks (7 ounces) butter, softened
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. almond extract (use vanilla extract in a pinch)
• 4 large eggs
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. allspice or nutmeg
Directions:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line the bottom of a medium-size loaf pan (81/2 x 4-1/2 x 2-1/2 inch) with wax paper. Spray bottom and sides of pan with nonstick cooking spray with flour. Toss the cherries with 2 tea-
spoons of the flour. Set aside.
In a medium bowl, beat the butter, sugar and almond extract until pale, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, along with about 1/4 cup of the flour. Mix well.
Add the baking powder, allspice or nutmeg, and the remaining flour, gradually mixing to blend. Using a wooden spoon, fold in the cherries. Transfer mixture to prepared loaf pan, smoothing the top with a spoon.
Bake in preheated oven for 50 minutes or until risen, golden and a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in center. Cool completely before wrapping.
Coconut Coffee Cake (Dairy)
Serves 10 to 12
Cook’s Tips: •Use instant coffee for wake-up flavor; unsweetened coconut gives crunch •If using sweetened coconut, omit the honey.
To buy: Unsweetened shredded coconut.
• 1-1/2 sticks (6 oz.) unsalted butter, softened
• 3/4 cup, plus 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1-1/4 tsp. baking powder
• 2 tsp. instant coffee granules
• 2 Tbsp. honey, warmed (omit if using sweetened coconut)
• 1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
• Shredded coconut to sprinkle
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line the bottom of an 8-inch square baking pan with wax paper to fit. Spray with nonstick cooking spray with flour. Set aside.
Cut the butter into 6 pieces. In a medium bowl, beat the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy (about 1 to 2 minutes).
Add the eggs, one at a time, along with about 1/4 cup flour. Beat in the remaining flour, baking powder, coffee and honey. Stir in the coconut. Transfer to prepared baking dish.
Bake in preheated oven for 40 to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes before removing from pan to cool completely. Cut into squares to serve.
Caraway-Seed Cake (Dairy)
Serves 10 to 12
In the fall, armed with a tin cup, I was sent to gather the pungent seeds of the caraway plants that grew wild by the roadside. Caraway is a popular Scottish (and Jewish) flavoring. If you love seeded rye bread, then this is your cake!
Cook’s Tips: •Substitute frozen orangejuice concentrate with 2 tablespoons orange juice and 1/2 teaspoon orange extract. •Buy caraway seeds and spices from a general spice store or natural-foods market, where you can measure exactly what you need. It’s much fresher and cheaper than buying premium glass jars of seeds at the supermarket.
To Buy: Caraway seeds, frozen orange-juice concentrate OR orange juice and orange extract.
• 3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp. frozen orange-juice concentrate, thawed
• 1-1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 2 Tbsp. caraway seeds
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line bottom of 1-1/2 quart cake pan, ovenproof soufflé dish or 9x5x3-inch loaf pan with wax paper cut to fit. Spray with nonstick cooking spray with flour.
In a medium bowl, cream butter and sugar until pale (about 1 to 2 minutes). Beat in eggs, one at a time, with about 1/4 cup flour. If curdling occurs, don’t panic! Add 2 to 3 Tbsp. flour and whisk on. Cake will not be compromised. Add the orange-juice concentrate. Mix well. Add in remaining flour and baking powder, about 1/4 cup at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the caraway seeds. Turn into prepared pan, smoothing top with a spoon. Bake in preheated oven 45 to 55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool slightly. Loosen edges with a round bladed knife before turning onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Roly-Poly (Dairy)
Serves 8 to 10
Cook’s Tips: •Purchase puff-pastry sheets from the supermarket in the frozen-food case. •Any dried fruits or a mixture of them, such as raisins, currants or chopped apricots, may be used. •Use up that jam/preserves at the bottom of the jar. If crystallized, microwave 12 to 15 seconds until melted. •Instead of ricotta cheese, a mild grated cheese like Muenster or white cheddar may be used. •No chocolate chips? Grate any chocolate you may have on
See Loving my Scottish-Chanukah on page 10
EthEL G. hofmAN
Glacé Cherry Loaf.
Ethel G Hofman Caraway-Seed Cake.
Ethel G Hofman
Jam-filled Roly-Poly.
Ethel G Hofman
Loving my Scottish-Chanukah ‘keepin’ cakes’…
Continued from page 8
hand. •Keep cinnamon-sugar on hand. Mix 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar with 2 to 3 teaspoons cinnamon. Store in a tightly lidded container in the kitchen cupboard. Use as needed.
• 3 Tbsp. ricotta cheese (or a mild grated cheese like Muenster or white cheddar)
• 1/2 cup mixed dried fruits
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips or grated chocolate
• 1 tsp. cinnamon sugar
Directions:
Preheat oven to 410 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil. Spray with nonstick baking spray with flour.
Unroll the pastry sheet and lay on a flat surface. Spread with preserves to within 1/2 inch of edges. Repeat with ricotta cheese. Sprinkle dried fruits and chocolate over top. Brush the top edge with a little water. Roll
Teaching OPPORTUniTieS :
inSTRUcTOR Of Science and inSTRUcTOR Of MaTh (positions can be combined), Maternity Leave Position, december 16 - february 13th, 2024-2025
The first position is for two high school introductory chemistry classes (10th Grade) and one high school introductory biology class (9th Grade). The courses follow the New York State Regents curriculum. The second position is for two periods of Algebra II math (11th Grade). The curriculum for the two classes is similar, with small changes to account for differing tracks. Appropriate candidates should know and feel comfortable with Algebra II material and be able to follow a curriculum that will be provided. All classes are taught in the afternoons between the hours of 1:23 and 5:10 pm, four days a week, MondayThursday. Teachers are asked to be in the building by 12:45 for department meetings and preparation. The ideal candidate will first and foremost be passionate about student growth as well as the teaching of Science and/or Math, and have a warm and engaging personality that can be used in developing meaningful relationships with each student. They will have mastery of educational pedagogy and the subject matter, but will also be strongly motivated by continued opportunities to grow and develop as an effective educator. We are looking for an experienced teacher leader who is comfortable working with both students and colleagues, and who is intentional about his/her educational approach. are you interested in joining our team? Please send a cover letter and resume to sschenker@yuhsb.org
Teaching OPPORTUniTy: Science (BiOlOgy/PhySicS) inSTRUcTOR 2024-2025 School year
We are looking for a dynamic, caring, organized, knowledgeable and thoughtful Science teacher to teach in a full time capacity for the remainder of the 24-25 academic year. The ideal candidate will first and foremost be passionate about student growth, and have a warm and engaging personality that can be used in developing meaningful relationships with each student. They will have mastery of educational pedagogy and the subject matter, but will also be strongly motivated by continued opportunities to grow and develop as an effective educator.
We are part of Yeshiva University, and benefit from the academic and cultural opportunities of teaching on the university campus. Our general studies faculty hours are 11:30 AM to 6 PM Monday through Thursday (no sessions on Friday), and we offer competitive salary and benefits packages.
Benefits include:
• Highly subsidized medical and dental plans
• Employer matched retirement plans
• Health and dependent care flexible savings accounts
• Commuter, Transit, and Parking plans
• Employer Paid Basic Life Insurance
• Tuition Remission Benefit
yeshiva University Tuition Remission Benefit: Do you want to pursue a degree while working at MTA? The YU tuition benefit covers 100% of tuition costs for employees enrolled in any YU program, 75% tuition costs for dependents in undergraduate programs, 50% for graduate programs, as well as generous tuition discounts for spouses. See tuition benefits document for more information. are you interested in joining
up loosely, and press ends and top edge to seal. Place sealed-side down on a prepared baking sheet. Prick all over surface, about 10 times, with a fork.
Bake in a preheated oven 25 to 30 minutes, until risen and nicely browned. It should be firm to the touch. Cool slightly on a wire tray. Slice 1-inch thick. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Whisky Fruit Cake (Dairy)
Serves 15 to 20
Don’t be put off by long ingredient list! After all, it’s a once-a-year holiday. To help it along, measure everything out the night beforehand. Put dry ingredients in one bowl, and fruits and nuts in another. Then mix and bake.
Cook’s Tips: •May substitute brandy for whisky. •Marzipan or almond paste is available in spice shops and supermarkets. Do not refrigerate.
To Buy: Ground almonds, brown sugar, currants, raisins, chopped walnuts, diced candied orange peel, glacé cherries, marzipan (optional).
• 1-1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 3/4 cup light-brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1-1/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 3 Tbsp. finely ground almonds
• 1 tsp. nutmeg
• 2 tsp. fresh ground pepper
• 1 cup currants
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 1 cup glacé cherries
• 1/2 cup diced candied orange peel
• 3 to 4 Tbsp. whisky, plus whisky for infusing weekly (may substitute brandy)
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line bottom of a 9-inch springform pan with wax paper to fit. Spray bottom and sides with nonstick cooking spray with flour. Set aside.
Cream softened butter and sugar in a large bowl (about 1 to 2 minutes). Add eggs, one at time, with 1/4 cup of the flour. Add the baking powder and remaining flour gradually, about 1/4 cup at a time, mixing well. Stir in all the remaining ingredients. Mixture will be stiff and sticky. Transfer mixture to prepared baking pan, smoothing top with a spoon. Bake in preheated oven for 1 to 1-1/4 hours, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in center. If cake seems to brown too quickly, cover loosely with foil. Cool slightly before removing from pan. While still warm, prick the cake all over the top with a metal skewer. Use a teaspoon to pour in the whisky. Allow to soak in thoroughly. Cool and wrap in cheesecloth, then in foil. Store in an airtight container in a cool dry place, though not in the refrigerator.
Traditional Scottish black-bun fruit cake that served as an inspiration for Jean Greenwald’s (the author’s mother) Whisky Fruit Cake. Ethel G Hofman
Coconut Coffee Cake. Ethel G Hofman
From one JNF-USA event to another, chasing the anti-Israel vitriol of part-time protesters
The search for the perfect protester interview ended last weekend with the clash of a cowbell, two years and three conferences later. Allow me to explain.
At the annual Jewish National Fund-USA event — in Boston in November 2022 — a ragtag group of three dozen or so anti-Israel protesters gathered outside the Omni Boston Hotel on an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon. Holding makeshift signs that read “Kill colonialism,” “End all US aid to Israel” and “Land is the basis for freedom and quality,” and shouting inaudibly through a bullhorn, they slogged back and forth for about an hour, murmuring slogans that seem more irritating than foreboding. They were almost all young people, some draped in keffiyehs or Palestinian flags. Several news stories ran afterwards but nothing that made policy headlines or seemed at all prescient.
JNF was created in 1901, before establishment of the modern-day State of Israel. The pushke charity, known for its blue boxes, signified planting trees, and later, the conservation and reuse of water.
Some suggested that in the minds of protesters, JNF was about something else completely — being the usurper of land. Arab land. That’s not the case, of course, but optics can be powerful. They can be transformative. And often very deceiving.
Fast-forward to November 2023, when the same conference was held in Denver under very different circumstances. It took place less than a month after the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 — an assault that killed 1,200, wounded thousands, and saw 251 men, women and children taken captive into the Gaza Strip.
Emotions were raw — so raw that the proceedings drew 2,500 people for the chance to grieve and convene together.
To attend the opening plenary, attendees had to walk from the Hyatt Regency to the Colorado Convention Center one long block away. Police screened off a path of sorts to separate
conference participants from the protesters. It didn’t work out so well; protesters spit, cursed, clanged cowbells, blew horns, and bellowed anti-Israel and anti-Jewish slogans.
One 20-something white male spewed: “How does it feel to kill a 5-year-old?” It was so random, yet so specific.
Warned by organizers not to engage, I cast him a motherly scowl and got a cold stare back; he looked through me, his face a block of stone. I wanted to quip that I happen to have four children, all of whom were once age 5, so it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. I doubt if that would have thrown him off his game.
I reconfigured, deciding that I would ask him or one of the others in that crowd out for a beer and an interview the next day. Surely, they would explain why they were standing in the cold screaming at the top of their lungs at Jewish Americans, a good number of them seniors. They could list their grievances and explain their motives. They could order a second and a third round, and by the time we left the city bar that I had already chosen for our little chat, they’d almost look sheepish, and head home to feed their cat and call their parents about their odd night out.
I never got the chance. The 100-plus-strong, tactical-gear-laden law-enforcement officers (local, state, even national) kept the protesters far from the attendees for the duration of the conference, save for a bit of pounding on the hotel windows one night.
The next few months turned into a bout of near misses. I’d be too late and they were already gone, police held them at bay and no one was allowed to approach, or they didn’t show up at all.
In one instance, student protesters threatened to shut down the showing of a music documentary as part of an Israel Film Festival, but the threat of a lawsuit stopped them. They still planned on disrupting the proceedings. With notebook in hand and a ticket to the movie, I arrived to find two women, cordoned off by police, standing across from the theater — one shaking a tambourine and another trying to draw attention to Native American rights. Some big story.
I’m not trying to make light of these protests. Many throughout the United States and the world have been belligerent, threatening, violent and dangerous. I am talking about the more benign demonstrators who show up to “hear themselves think,” as my mother would say. Many may believe in what they’re doing; many more simply lift a sign someone hands to them with words they don’t bother to understand. Often, it seems more about them than the people they’re supposedly supporting.
By the time I arrived for the 2024 Jewish National Fund-USA conference in Dallas (Nov. 1417), I was a bit jaded. Still, I heard that demonstrators were coming on several buses to “shut down JNF.”
Their tactic was to make noise most of the night outside the Hilton Anatole hotel complex
and keep conference attendees awake. The problem? Everything is bigger in Texas. Protesters were positioned so far from the rooms (the hotel sits on 45 acres) that a dull roar could be heard — something a sound machine, TV or headphones could drown out. On Saturday afternoon, they pulled out their Boston playbook and walked the perimeter of the hotel clanging their bells and chanting their chants. The mild weather encouraged them, but most conference attendees were too busy with lectures and lunch to give them much thought.
Then came the denouement on Saturday night. They upped their game, determined to disrupt. Little did they know that the JNFuture After Party for young adults was in full swing with its own deafening music; other guests were at the bar or in bed. Many thought the ruckus was simply the sounds of the city.
I walked out to their perimeter at about midnight, where mellow police stood guard, and filmed them by phone for a bit. Popping out his earplugs, one of the officers said my head might start hurting if I stayed too long. I could have moved over to the rally line, could have gestured to a sign-holder and mouthed a few questions. I could have asked if they planned to sleep at all that night — whatever few hours were left of it — on the buses. Or maybe they had hotel rooms of their own, complete with a K-Cup coffee machine. But it was late. The lure had left. The fix was over, at least until next fall. The conference is scheduled to take place in Southeast Florida, the third-largest Jewish community in America after New York City and Los Angeles. A good many Israelis live there, and Floridians tend to have thick skins, so we’ll see what transpires.
Still, a memory from last year in Denver remains with me. At the conclusion of the conference, as I was wheeling my suitcase along the sidewalk to catch a ride to the airport, I passed a trash can — one of those older, green metal ones with a wide rim. It was full of discarded coffee cups, plastic bags and food detritus, but on top was a large discarded flier. It read: “From Palestine to Philippines: Stop the US” with the graphic of an angry woman in jeans and a T-shirt, a keffiyeh wrapped around her dark hair, kicking the chest of a white man dressed in his work suit. You’d think the holder would have kept it for future use or as a souvenir from their time on the frontlines. Or at least have recycled it.
Then again, maybe it was right where it belonged.
Carin M. Smilk is managing editor of the US bureau of JNS. To reach her, write: Columnist@ TheJewishStar.com
Protesters at the Jewish National Fund-USA conference in Dallas this month. Carin M. Smilk
Black Friday Weekend Sale Event
Friday, November 29th
Sat, Nov. 30th: 7pm - Midnight!
Sunday, December 1st
Jewish Star Torah columnists:
•Rabbi Avi Billet of Anshei Chesed, Boynton Beach, FL, mohel and Five Towns native •Rabbi David Etengoff of Magen David Yeshivah, Brooklyn
•Rabbi Binny Freedman, rosh yeshiva of Orayta, Jerusalem
Contributing writers:
•Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks zt”l,
former chief rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth •Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh
Weinreb, OU executive VP emeritus
•Rabbi Raymond Apple, emeritus rabbi, Great Synagogue of Sydney
•Rabbi Yossy Goldman, life rabbi emeritus, Sydenham Shul, Johannesburg and president of the South African Rabbinical Association.
Five Towns Candlelighting: From the White Shul, Far Rockaway, NY
תבש לש
Fri Nov 29 / Cheshvan 28
Shabbos Mevarchim • Toldos
Candles: 4:10
• Havdalah: 5:19
Fri Dec 6 / Kislev 5
Vayetzei
Candles: 4:09 • Havdalah: 5:18
Fri Dec 13 / Kislev 12
Vayishlach
Candles: 4:10 • Havdalah: 5:19
Fri Dec 20 / Kislev 19
Vayeshev
Candles: 4:13
• Havdalah: 5:22
Wed Dec 25 / Kislev 24
Erev Chanukah • First Candle Wed Night
Fri Dec 27 / Kislev 26
Chanukah • Shabbos Mevarchim • Miketz
Candles: 4:17 • Havdalah: 5:26
Confronting the tragedy of good intentions
rabbi Sir JonaThan
SaCkS zt”l
It is the deep, reverberating question at the heart of Toldot. Why did Rebecca tell Jacob to deceive Isaac and take Esau’s blessing? Her instruction is brisk and peremptory:
Now, my son, listen carefully and do what I tell you: Go now to the flock and bring me two choice young goats, so I can prepare some tasty food for your father, just the way he likes it. Then take it to your father to eat, so that he may give you his blessing before he dies. Gen. 27:8-10
Rebecca’s swift action is extraordinary; she had no doubts or hesitations. When Jacob raised concerns (What if Isaac is not deceived? What if he touches my skin and knows immediately that I am not Esau?) her reply is brief and blunt.
My son, let the curse fall on me. Just do what I say; go and get them for me. Gen. 27:13
Our question tends to be, how could Jacob deceive his father? Yet the real question is about Rebecca; it was her plan, not his. How did she consider it permissible to deceive her husband, to deprive Esau of his father’s blessing, and to order Jacob to commit an act of dishonesty? Jacob on his own would not have conceived such a plan; he was an ish tam, a simple, straightforward, plain, quiet, innocent man, a man of integrity (Gen. 25:27).
There are three possible answers.
•The first: she loved Jacob (Gen. 25:28). She preferred him to Esau, but she knew Isaac felt
Torah is telling us that communication is vital, however hard it is.
otherwise. So she was driven by maternal instinct. She wanted her beloved son to be blessed.
This is an unlikely answer. The patriarchs and matriarchs are role-models, not driven by mere instinct or vicarious ambition. Rebecca was not Lady Macbeth. Nor was she Bathsheba, engaging in court politics to ensure that her son, Solomon, would inherit David’s throne (see 1 Kings 1). It would be a serious misreading to interpret the narrative this way.
•The second possibility is that she believed strongly that Esau was the wrong person to inherit the blessing. She had already seen how readily he had sold his birthright and “despised” it (Gen. 25:31-34). She did not believe a “hunter” and “a man of the field” fitted the template of the Abrahamic covenant. It was vital to the future of the covenant that it be entrusted to the child who had the right qualities to live by its high demands.
•The third possibility is simply that she was guided by the oracle she had received prior to the twins’ birth:
Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger. Gen. 25:23
Jacob was the younger. Therefore, Rebecca must have assumed, he was destined to receive the blessing.
Possibilities two and three make sense, but only at the cost of raising a more fundamental question. Did Rebecca share her thoughts with Isaac? If she did, then why did Isaac persist in seeking to bless Esau? If she did not, then why not?
It is here that we must turn to a fundamental insight of the Netziv (R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, 1816-1893). What is fascinating is that Netziv makes his comment, not on this week’s parsha, but on last week’s — the first time Rebecca set eyes on her husband-to-be. Recall that Isaac did not choose his wife. Abraham entrusted that task to his servant. Servant and bride-to-be are travelling back by camel, and as they approach Abra-
ham’s tents, Rebecca sees a figure in the distance Now Isaac had come from Beer Lahai Roi, for he was living in the Negev. He went out to the field one evening to meditate, and as he looked up, he saw camels approaching. Rebecca also looked up and saw Isaac. She got down from her camel and asked the servant, “Who is that man in the field coming to meet us?” “He is my master,” the servant answered. So she took her veil and covered herself. Gen. 24:62-65
On this Netziv comments, “She covered herself out of awe and a sense of inadequacy as if she felt she was unworthy to be his wife, and from then on this trepidation was fixed in her mind. Her relationship with Isaac was not the same as that between Sarah and Abraham or Rachel and Jacob. When they had a problem they were not afraid to speak about it. Not so with Rebecca.”
Commentary to Gen. 24:65
Netziv understood that in this description of the first encounter between Rebecca and Isaac, nothing is incidental. The text emphasizes distance in every sense. Isaac is physically far away when Rebecca spots him. He is also mentally far away: meditating, deep in thought and prayer. Rebecca imposes her own distance by covering herself with a veil.
The distance goes deeper still.
Isaac is the most withdrawn of the patriarchs. Rarely do we see him as the initiator of a course of action. The events of his life seem to mirror those of his father.
The Torah associates him with pachad, “fear” (Gen. 31:42). Jewish mysticism connected him with gevurah, best understood as “self-restraint.” This is the man who had been bound as a sacrifice on an altar, whose life had been reprieved only at
See Sacks on page 22
Jonathan Sacks archive is dedicated in Jerusalem
By Judy Lash Balint, JNS
Ten years ago, when the National Library of Israel’s new facility was in its initial planning stages, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks put forward a controversial proposal. He suggested that important visitors to Israel be taken first to the National Library, and not to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center as is customary.
“Let us show the world not only how Jews died but how Jews live,” he wrote, adding that the new library should be subtitled, “The Home of the Book for the People of the Book.”
The fourth anniversary of his death was marked at the National Library in Jerusalem’s Givat Ram neighborhood with the Rabbi Sacks Global Day of Learning, as well as the dedication
of the Rabbi Sacks Archive that includes 30 boxes of notes, speeches and handwritten correspondence from the rabbi who became a global religious leader, philosopher, award-winning author and respected moral voice.
While the central event took place in Jerusalem, 150 communities in five continents participated in this year’s Sacks Global Day of Learning.
After serving for 22 years as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Rabbi Sacks became a sought-after contributor to radio, television and the press, both in Britain and around the world, and was a visiting professor at Yeshiva University and New York University.
While he never made his permanent home
in Israel, he visited frequently.
National Library archivist Rachel Misrati told visitors at the dedication that more than 50,000 copies of Sacks’ series of Torah commentary, “Sig V’Siach” (originally published in English as “Covenant and Conversation”) have been sold.
The archives on display include a letter Rabbi Sacks wrote to Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, in 1990, asking advice about whether to take the position of chief rabbi. In the typed letter, Rabbi Sacks asks, “should I take the position?”
Schneerson sent back the letter with the proofreading mark for inversion, changing the question to a statement: “I should…”
Other items in include an exchange of corre-
spondence with then-Prince Charles, and a letter from Rabbi Sacks to the rabbis of his United Synagogue movement during the Second Intifada in which he urged the rabbis to step up to defend Israel and urge their congregants to visit.
The National Library event included The Sacks Conversation between US Ambassador to Israel Jacob J. Lew and Jerusalem-born writer and educator Rachel Sharansky Danziger. His brother, Alan Sacks, a trustee of the Sacks Legacy, said at the Sacks Conversation that his brother “knew that democracy begins and ends with conversation. When conversation ends, democracy dies.” One of the goals of the Sacks Legacy, he added, is that “there should be more conversation and less confrontation.”
When Steve Jobs was 17 he saw a quote: “If you live each day as though it were your last, some day you will most certainly be right.”
Delivering a now famous commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, he recounted that after seeing that quote, every day in the morning he would look in the mirror and ask himself, “If today were the last day of my life would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer had been no for too many days in a row, he knew something needed to change.
Jobs said that remembering he would be dead soon was the greatest tool he ever encountered for helping to make the big choices in life, because almost everything (fear of failure, external expectations, pride) falls away in the face of death.
A year earlier he had been diagnosed with
cancer. At 7:30 in the morning, they showed him a tumor on his pancreas and told him it was most likely incurable; he was told he had 3 to 6 months to live.
His doctor told him to go home and get his affairs in order, which means prepare to die. It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the rest of your life to tell them. It means to get everything buttoned up so it will be as easy as possible for your family when you are gone. It means … say your goodbyes.
He lived with this all day. Then that night, they did a biopsy on his pancreas and discovered he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer that was curable with surgery; he had the surgery and survived.
Concluding his Stanford address, Jobs said: Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma … don’t let the noise of other people’s thinking drown out the sound of your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
This week’s portion, Toldot, tells of an impossible choice: Which of the two sons of Yitzchak and Rivkah should receive the blessing of leadership and be chosen as the next patriarch of the family of Abraham, soon to be the Jewish people?
Yaakov and Esau, despite being twins, are two completely different personalities: Esau is the hunter, the outdoorsman; Yaakov is the scholar and introvert, who stays near the tents. Esau is loved by his father, and Yaakov is apparently the apple of his mother’s eye.
The Torah shares with us how, despite being born first, Esau “despises the birthright,” selling it to his younger brother for a pot of soup. Clearly, Esau, who lives in the moment, was not meant to carry the torch of Avraham’s monotheistic new religion.
And yet, the Torah dedicates an inordinate
amount of time to the struggle Yitzchak seems to have in blessing Yaakov, not to mention the pain Esau experiences in being deceived and missing the opportunity to be “the chosen one.”
Ultimately, Esau, begging his father for some remaining blessing after Yitzchak was blessed, breaks down and weeps. We feel his pain.
Why does the Torah bother with all these details? Why not just tell us that Yitzchak blessed Yaakov?
And it does not end there: Jewish rabbinic tradition, despite vilifying Esau, will nonetheless ascribe to him tremendous respect for his father to the point that he is clearly troubled by the angst he causes his father over his marriage to Hittite (Canaanite) women, and thus takes a wife from the daughters of Yishmael to appease his parents.
Ultimately when the Jewish people journey towards the conquest of the land of Israel, G-d makes it clear they are not allowed to take even a foot of the land of Seir which was given to Edom, the descendants of Esau. There is even a specific injunction — “lo te’taev Edomi, ki achicha’ hu” (“you shall not despise the Edomite, for he is your brother”)!
Just how well do parents know their children?
It is commonly assumed that parents know their children better than anyone else knows them. Many mothers will insist that their acquaintance with their children began even before they were born.
As a parent myself and as one who has spent his professional life in the fields of education and child psychology, I have come to a very different conclusion. I now am convinced that relatively few parents really know their children and often are tragically oblivious to their child’s strengths and weaknesses.
This week’s Torah portion, Toldot, provides us with a window into the parent-child relationship in general and allows us to analyze and speculate about one particular such relationship. You guessed it — I’m referring to Yitzchak and Rivka,
parents of the twin boys, Esav and Yaakov.
At first, Yitzchak and Rivka had difficulty conceiving a child. They prayed desperately. Rashi imprints upon us the image of them both standing in diametrically opposite corners of a room, beseeching the Almighty for a child.
That image portrays two individuals with diverse expectations. One might conjecture that Yitzchak stood in his corner praying for the type of child he would welcome, while Rivka stood “over and against him” in the other corner with a very different sort of offspring in her dreams. Their prayers were answered, and both Yitzchak and Rivka had their dreams fulfilled. Twins were born, and from birth they displayed very different dispositions and behavior patterns. Esav developed into “a man of the field” and became a “cunning hunter.” Yaakov became a “quiet person,” a homebody.
On this basis alone, one would predict that Rivka’s maternal instincts would cause her to favor Yaakov and cherish his complacent personality, which Yitzchak would find Esav more to his liking since he too spent time in the
Our parsha, Toldot, shares three stories. The first is the background to the birth of Eisav and Yaakov and the sale of the bechora (birthright); the second is in the chapter dedicated to the life of Yitzchak, and the final concerns the blessings seemingly intended for Eisav which Yaakov received based on his mother’s intervention and instruction.
If I could summarize each of these stories and their aftermath, based on the text we have, it would sound like this:
The first story is divided into two parts. The tension of pregnancy is resolved with an assurance that two nations will emerge. Tension between the twins is resolved through a financial arrangement agreed to by both sides.
The second story also has two components. First, tension is resolved with an understanding of who the parties are — Yitzchak and Rivkah being husband and wife. And tension is resolved when, some time after having realized that
Yitzchak’s being in his city was a blessing and that his kicking Yitzchak out had not been good for business, Avimelekh comes with his general and a group of ambassadors and tells Yitzchak that because they now recognize that G-d is with him, they want him to be on their side. In an encounter with the Gerarites, Avraham had explained to them that he was not on the up and up about his relationship with Sarah, claiming to be her brother and not mentioning that he was also her wife was because they were not G-d-fearing. At this point, they appear to have learned their lesson and have come around, and the tension ends with a new treaty.
The third story has tension between brothers not coming to a resolution, because the only thing that will heal the raw hurt is time. But who is to blame? Who cheated whom? Where is the address for Eisav’s grievance — against Yaakov, against their mother, against their father? Is Eisav’s grievance even warranted? Shouldn’t he have told his father, “I know what you want me to do, and why, but the fact is that while I am the older brother, I sold all merits of the birthright to my brother some time ago — so if this is about a blessing to a first born, you have the wrong guy.”
Eisav did not do that. That conversation might have given us a clearer picture into Yitzchak’s in-
fields.
As we continue to read the text, we discover that our suppositions were correct: “Now Yitzchak loved Esav because he did eat of his venison; and Rivka loved Yaakov.”
We have no trouble accepting that Rivka loved Yaakov, and it doesn’t occur to us to ask, “Why?” Her love was based on every mother’s unconditional love for her son, especially since he was such a “good little boy.”
But we are stumped when we try to understand Yitzchak’s love for Esav. Was Yitzchak’s love to be gained by an occasional treat of a few slices of venison? Surely, Yitzchak would have higher standards for his child than a serving of delicatessen!
We are not alone when we are confounded by Yitzchak’s strange preference for his “cunning hunter” over and above his “dweller in the tents,” presumably the “tents of study and spiritual practices.” Numerous commentators have been similarly confounded and suggest in a wide variety of responses.
One such response is offered by Rabbi Yosef
Be’er Yosef.
The basis of his approach is to be found in Rambam’s sixth chapter of his “Eight Chapters” of introduction to Pirkei Avot.
There Rambam reflects upon the following theological question: Who stands higher in the ranks of the righteous? Is it the person who is dispassionate, who faces no internal religious doubts or immoral urges? Or is it the person who knows temptation, who is beset by all sorts of illicit desires, but who suppresses them successfully and behaves properly?
Rambam reports that there is a basic argument here between the “philosophers” and the “Torah sources.” The former believe that it is the pure soul who never experiences sinful inner tendencies who stands higher than the one who overcomes his nasty evil urges.
The Torah, on the other hand, values the person who controls himself, refrains from acting on his passions, and behaves in a punctiliously correct manner.
tentions — meaning if he had only called to “Eisav” and not to “his son who is ‘gadol’,” we would know for sure. But once we see he’s dealing with a descriptive, then the question is who really owns that descriptive?
So is Eisav’s rage warranted in the end? He wants to kill his brother. Is that a proper response? Wouldn’t a better response have been, “let’s come to the table and reach an equitable resolution of this misunderstanding.”
Perhaps the value of the blessing in question is something I don’t completely understand (when Eisav and Yaakov meet up in chapter 32, they both seem to be doing fine financially), but surely this kind of discussion could be had at a negotiating table. Maybe Eisav could have even said, “Thank you for keeping me honest!”
But there is a hatred that goes beyond reason. And this is why Eisav is described in our tradition as wicked. When you don’t like what happened, your immediate response is rage and murder? To Eisav’s credit, he cared about his father too much so he didn’t immediately act on his impulse.
It’s difficult to judge Yitzcak, Eisav and Yaakov.
Eisav felt cheated, and from his perspective this was justified. Yaakov felt his perspective was justified. And while Yitzchak may have felt, on the one hand, that he was deceived (27:35),
on the other hand, he does not undo the blessing and he even affirms it (end of 27:33).
When we consider Eisav’s rage and his plan to murder Yaakov, we need to consider this: Did Yaakov ruin Eisav’s life? On the contrary, he took a burden of the birthright, which Eisav did not value and did not want, off Eisav’s hands in an agreed upon transaction. And, in all honesty, owing to our knowing what Rivkah knows, he also followed through with what was rightly coming to him due to their prior agreements.
Eisav, you can’t have it both ways. You made an agreement, didn’t hold yourself to it, then you get angry when you don’t get what you might think is yours but really isn’t!
The verse says that Eisav “SOLD his birthright to Yaakov” and that “Yaakov GAVE to Eisav the soup and bread and something to drink.”
That was not the price of the birthright, it was a meal to celebrate the transaction. Eisav should be grateful, and acknowledge that there are no takebacks. Rivkah, and in turn, Yaakov, kept him honest in taking the blessing that was Yaakov’s to receive. Eisav should say thank you!
Hate and rage are not justifications for killing innocents, it is just an emotion that separates good people from bad people. Good people can
Tzvi Salant, the Jerusalem teacher and preacher of two generations ago, in his two-volume commentary,
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College Jew haters and enablers aren’t victims
Jonathan S. tobin
JnS Editor-in-Chief
Are America’s institutions of higher education finally taking the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism seriously? According to the New York Times, the answer is that they’re taking it far too seriously.
That’s the upshot of just the latest in a series of articles in the Times and elsewhere seeking to flip the script about the widespread toleration of antisemitic activism on college campuses.
With many institutions under pressure from Congress and their donors to behave as if they were not complicit in the campaigns of leftist activists to anathematize Jews, there has been a decline in the number and tolerance of demonstrations where mobs chant slogans calling for Jewish genocide. But the reaction to this from liberal journalists is that these so-called “crackdowns” are the real outrage.
According to the Times, the problem is that in a foolish attempt to assuage the hurt feelings of some Jews and to avoid the potential wrath of the federal government, colleges have suppressed “pro-Palestinian” activists.
As proof of this, the article pointed to a study conducted by Harvard University (itself one of the worst offenders in the toleration of antisemitic demonstrators), which claimed that the number of “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations held during the current fall semester at American institutions of higher learning to have numbered only 950. That compares to what it says were more than 3,000 such “events” during the 2024 spring semester. And while more than 3,100 arrests were made at demonstrations in the spring, so far, Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab says only about 50 have been addressed since the start of the new academic year.
This is being proclaimed by many in higher education and even some in the Jewish community as a great improvement. However, while the numbers are lower, congratulations are certainly not in order.
Would 950 ‘Charlottesvilles’ be applauded?
Would anyone say that only 950 iterations of the “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017, rather than thousands of them, would be something for Americans to applaud? Surely not.
Yet that is exactly what is being asked since the pro-Hamas outbreaks represented the moral equivalent of what happened in Charlottesville, replete with antisemitic chants and sometimes (as a photo accompanying the Times article illus-
trated) with the same sort of imagery of candles held by anti-Israel mobs replacing the tiki torches of the neo-Nazis.
In the bizarro world of liberal media, even a reduction in the number of antisemitic incidents is itself the problem. While liberal groups would have had no trouble with far more draconian actions being taken against anyone on campus who participated in demonstrations calling for violence against African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians or members of the LGBTQ+ community, the notion that supporters of Hamas and opponents of Israel’s existence should be forced to abide by rules that prevented illegal demonstrations or intimidation of a minority group is seen as the real outrage.
Taking the lead from those who have organized these demonstrations (which have, in some cases, been funded by foreign sources like the terrorist-supporting government of Iran), the Times and other media outlets have been treating those engaged in open antisemitism as wellmeaning idealists who are motivated by concern for the suffering of Palestinian Arabs.
The result is, they say, an effort to silence student activists — something that amounts to a form of authoritarianism.
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors and an associate professor of media studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, was quoted as saying that the “restrictions” imposed on demonstrators have made people afraid.
“They feel like they’re being watched and surveilled,” he said. “I think there’s a strong degree of self-censorship that’s taking place.”
The Times failed to say that the association he heads has, under his leadership, reversed its long opposition to academic boycotts in order to support BDS campaigns, which amount to illegal discrimination against Israel, Israelis and those who advocate for the Jewish state.
Woke ideology fuels Jew-hatred
As historian Niall Ferguson wrote last December in The Free Press, what has happened in American academia is a new version of the “treason of the intellectuals” in the 1920s and 1930s, as the intelligentsia justified a wave of fascist and Nazi antisemitism in European institutions of higher learning.
They, too, portrayed themselves as victims
of the Jews and those whom they claimed that the Jews were manipulating — a precursor of today’s efforts to depict pressure from alumni, donors and politicians to stop the toleration of Jew-hatred as intolerable interference with “academic freedom.”
In many cases, this so-called wave of repression has amounted to nothing more than enforcing previously existing rules of conduct. Such regulations were often ignored after the Hamasled terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as administrators feared the rage of activists — who were often as likely to be school employees or faculty members as students — far more than they did for being called out for their inaction.
This makes sense once you understand that the impetus for the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish mobs was the conquest of American education by those advocating for critical race theory and intersectionality. These toxic ideas not only seek to divide humanity into two permanently warring groups — “white” oppressors and the oppressed, the latter of whom are people of color and other
College ‘crackdowns’ on pro-Hamas mobs are portrayed as repression of free speech. Trump should make good on his threat to defund academic institutions and deport offenders.
designated minorities.
They also define Jews and Israelis as “white” racist colonialists and the Palestinians as their victims, even though race has nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East. In this way, nothing Israel does is justifiable and nothing the Palestinians do, including the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7, is not justified.
This belief has become not so much the current intellectual fashion as the reigning orthodoxy on campuses as well as in many K-12 schools as a result of the imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) being imposed on so much of American society. Though supposedly intended to promote justice, the result of indoctrination in ideas like equity, which is the opposite of equal opportunity, and the veneration of “diversity” and “inclusion” that excludes non-leftist views and stigmatizes Jews has fueled a surge in antisemitism.
It was this sort of thinking that caused three university presidents to testify to Congress last December that it depended on the “context” as to whether advocacy for the genocide of the Jews would violate the rules of their schools.
In the name of this new secular faith, in the months following the Oct. 7 massacre conducted by Hamas and other Palestinians, thousands of demonstrations took place at universities and colleges in which students, faculty and staff proclaimed their support for anti-Jewish terrorism (“globalize the intifada”), Hamas and its genocidal goal of destroying the Jewish state (“from
See Tobin on page 22
Students at a pro-Palestinian tent encampment at the University of Minnesota — following one cleared by police the week before — on May 1 Chad Davis via WikiCommons
Expressing thanksgiving, voicing
ROBIN LEMBERG
The Heart Monitors
Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude — a chance to pause, reflect and celebrate the blessings in our lives. But for many families, it’s also a time of high emotions, tension and even division.
Conversations about politics, Israel or the state of the world can easily create rifts at the Thanksgiving table. For the Jewish community, these divisions often run deep, touching on personal identities, generational differences and competing visions for the future.
Yet Judaism teaches us that even amid conflict, gratitude and hope can be powerful unifiers. The Shehecheyanu is a central blessing in Judaism. It reminds us to celebrate life’s moments of newness and joy, giving thanks for the ability to reach this moment together. And it offers an important lesson:
While we may not always agree, we can still come together to honor what we share — our values, our heritage and our collective hope for
Gratitude recognizes the good in our lives, even in the face of hardship.
a brighter future.
The Shehecheyanu is recited during moments of joy, renewal or new experiences. It reminds us to pause and give thanks for life, sustenance and the opportunity to be present in the moment.
Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, Sovereign of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this moment.
Gratitude is at the heart of both Judaism and Thanksgiving. Our core prayers, including the Shehecheyanu, are centered on the recognition of blessings in the present moment. But Jewish values extend even further, offering a framework for finding common ground in challenging times.
Hope and positivity: Judaism has always centered on hope — on believing in a better tomorrow even in the face of adversity. This is the spirit of Chanukah, where a small band of brothers — the Maccabees — protected the Second Temple against overwhelming odds, and the oil to light the arc holding the Torah lasted not one day but eight. Chanukah is a celebration of faith and resilience; it’s a reminder that light can prevail even in the darkest of times.
Gratitude for freedom: As Jews, we are profoundly grateful for the freedoms we enjoy in this country, imperfect as it may sometimes feel. We are thankful for the ability to practice our faith, express our beliefs and stand against antisemitism with the support of allies.
Unity in diversity: While we may disagree about Israel’s actions or political ideologies, we can unite around shared principles. Gratitude, respect for life and the importance of community are values that transcend our dif-
ferences and anchor us as a people.
This Thanksgiving, as families and friends gather to reflect on their blessings, we have an opportunity to infuse the holiday with Jewish values and traditions that inspire unity and understanding. Incorporating the spirit of the Shehecheyanu into Thanksgiving is one way to do this — by embracing gratitude for the present moment and the people around us, no matter our disagreements.
Here are a few ideas to consider:
Express gratitude for shared blessings: Take a moment to reflect on what unites us—
•Gratitude for family and friends who love and support us.
•Gratitude for the freedoms we enjoy in America, including the ability to practice our faith and share our beliefs.
•Gratitude for Israel, a homeland that has demonstrated resilience and innovation.
•Gratitude for hope, the belief that even amidst challenges, we can work towards a brighter future.
Share the miracle of hope: As Chanukah approaches, reflect on the courage of the Maccabees and the miracle of the menorah. Their story is a powerful reminder that no matter how divided or overwhelmed we feel, unity and resilience can lead to light and renewal.
Foster constructive conversations: Acknowledge that family members may hold different views but commit to approaching discussions with civility and respect. Gratitude for one another should be the foundation of every interaction.
Emphasize what we share across different faiths, not what divides us: Thanksgiv-
ing often brings together people of various backgrounds and beliefs. The Shehecheyanu highlights gratitude and presence in a way that resonates universally, offering a moment to reflect on shared values rather than differences.
The Shehecheyanu and the story of Chanukah remind us that gratitude is not just a feeling; it’s a practice. It’s a way of recognizing the good in our lives, even in the face of hardship.
This Thanksgiving, let us embrace that practice. Let us be thankful for each other, for the values that guide us and the freedoms we enjoy, even when they feel imperfect.
As we approach the season of miracles, may we find light in the darkness, hope in each other and unity in these precious shared moments.
Robin Lemberg is co-founder of The Heart Monitors, a strategy and insight consultancy. To reach her, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar. com
It’s a ‘Temple Mount is in Our Hands’ moment
ALAN
Avisit to the biblical town of Hevron for Shabbat Chayei Sarah is incredibly uplifting and enlightening. Though the wars in Gaza and Lebanon go on at terrible cost, and Israel deals with threats on five other fronts, being in the ir avot, the city of our forefathers, reminds us who we are and what we are fighting for — we fight for our family and we fight for our ancient Jewish heritage.
The name Hevron comes from the root word haaver (friend, neighbor, fellow Jew). Thus, just as Yerushalayim defines the relationship between aadam v’HaMakom (man — and woman — with Hashem), Hevron defines the relationship between aadam v’chavero (man — and woman — with their fellow Jew).
While there, surrounded by several thousands of like-minded visitors and about 1,000 permanent residents, one has the time and ability to analyze our national situation with clarity. We heard from multiple members of Knesset, ministers of the government, as well as “regular people,” citizens of this holy land. Of course everyone has an opinion. But the consensus is that we are living in the most historic period of our lifetime.
There is unanimity that the incoming Trump administration will be the most pro-Israel admin-
After King David defeated his enemies, Shlomo made alliances and enjoyed 40 years of peace — undid only by disunity.
istration in the modern state’s 76-year history.
•US Ambassador-designate to Israel Mike Huckabee says he will never refer to the West Bank by that name, but as Judea and Samaria.
•Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio has said the two-state solution is a non-starter.
•Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hesgeth has previously said he would not be unhappy with the prospect of establishing the third Temple on the Temple Mount!
For those old enough to remember 1967 and the miraculous victory of the Six Day War, with the recovery of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount after almost 2,000 years, these times seem familiar. Hashem has given us an extraordinary opportunity to change our history.
In 1967, the fledgling state and its leaders were too timid and perhaps too hopeful that “peace overtures” and givebacks would lead to our acceptance in the region. They gave away the holiest site for Jews in the entire world, the Temple Mount, home of two Temples and a future third. We know the consequences of that unfortunate and misguided decision.
Every time we gave “land for peace” we got “land for terror and death.”
Despite being ostensibly a sovereign nation, Israel’s relationship with the United States is almost like parent and child. While mutually beneficial, this relationship is fraught with challenges and difficulties, especially as the “child” grows to maturity. Israel has progressed from being an essentially client state of the United States to an independent nation that yields enormous technological, medical, spiritual and philosophical advantages to the entire world . We can no longer be timid. We must be bold and assertive. We need not ask permission of anyone. We have permission; we must prepare a wish list:
• Sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria.
•Deportation of Arabs from Gaza and also those in Judea and Samaria who seek the state’s destruction.
•One Jewish State à la ambassador David Friedman’s plan.
•And of course, the first order of business is the elimination of the evil Ayatollah regime in Iran. The Iranian people for the most part have been allies of Israel for centuries; it is time to remove their tyrannical burden and once again reestablish our alliance.
The consequences of these actions will be enormously beneficial.
•First we will have demonstrated to the Trump administration that Israel is a strong and dependable ally, something Trump respects.
•Second we will have shown the world, especially the Moslem world, that we are the “strong horse.”
Saudi Arabia, which is anxious to have access through Gaza to the Mediterranean for exportation of its oil as well as a plethora of other business opportunities (thank you Jared Kushner) will rush to conclude an agreement with Israel. The rest of the Moslem world, notably Qatar (which has been funding a great deal of the antiIsrael and antisemitic protests and propaganda on college campuses) will be forced to comply. Israel’s economy will blossom — and even more importantly, its self-respect.
Will there still be evil enemies like Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Isis? Until Moshiach comes, of course. But they will be minor and contained, unfunded and no longer a threat to Jewish existence.
These “plans” are not novel; they are G-d’s plans. He made it all come together, in ways that seem miraculous. And He outlined it for us all in the Tanach.
After David Hamelech had defeated all of his enemies, his son Shlomo made alliances with all the nations around him and dwelled for 40 years in peace. The only thing that undid it was our own disunity.
We must learn the lessons of our history. We must grow up as a nation, defeat our enemies, make mutually beneficial alliances, and take on the most difficult task — maintaining national unity.
When we accept the lesson of Hevron — bein aadam L’chavero, to create and maintain respect and understanding for our fellow Jew — the peace that we will have created will endure, and Moshiach’s arrival will come as no surprise.
Dr. Alan Mazurek is a retired neurologist, living in Great Neck, Jerusalem and Florida. He is a former chairman of the Zionist Organization of America. To reach him, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
A view of an expansive plaza next to the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine that sits where the Jewish Temples once stood, in the background. Ed Weintrob, The Jewish Star file
Hudsoncrafted, Pixabay
MUZUREK
Great Neck and Baka
Amsterdamned: The shame of Femke Halsema
In the arsenal of the antisemite, denial is a key weapon.
•Six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust? Didn’t happen.
•The Soviet Union persecuted its Jewish population in the name of anti-Zionism? Zionist propaganda.
•Rape and mutilation were rampant during the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023? What a smear upon the noble resistance of Hamas. And so on.
No surprise, then, that the left-wing mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is now publicly regretting her use of the word “pogrom” in her summation of the shocking antisemitic violence unleashed by Arab and Muslim gangs in the Dutch city in the wake of the soccer match between local giants Ajax and visitors Maccabi Tel Aviv two weeks ago.
One day after the violence, Halsema noted that “boys on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli football fans, it was a hit and run. I understand very well that this brings back the memory of pogroms.”
She could have also mentioned (but didn’t) that the Dutch authorities ignore d warnings from Israel that the violence was being stoked in advance in private threads on social-media platforms, resulting in a massive policing failure; that Ajax supporters were not involved in the attacks, undermining claims that what happened was merely another episode in the long history of inter-fan violence at soccer matches; and that the “boys” engaged in the assaults were overwhelmingly youths of Moroccan or other Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds, who gleefully told their victims that their actions
were motivated by the desire to “free Palestine.”
But at least Halsema grasped the nature of the violence. Or so we thought.
Afew days later, she rolled back her initial comments.
“I must say that in the following days, I saw how the word ‘pogrom’ became very political and actually became propaganda,” she stated in an interview with Dutch media. “The Israeli government, talking about a Palestinian pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam. In The Hague, the word pogrom is mainly used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers, Muslims. I didn’t mean it that way. And I didn’t want it that way.”
On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.”
Halsema’s discomfort does not, of course, mean that what happened in Amsterdam was not a pogrom. Nor does she speak for the entirety of the Dutch political class. Both the center-right VVD Party and the further-right PVV Party, for example, continue to describe the violence as a pogrom and have suggested strong measures for countering further outrages targeting local Jews and visiting Israelis. Both parties have urged a clampdown on mosque funding from countries promoting Islamism, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and have called on the Netherlands to follow Germany’s example in denying or removing citizenship from those convicted of antisemitism.
But the mayor’s 180-degree turn speaks volumes about how the left in Europe enables antisemitism by denying that it is a serious problem.
To begin with, there is a refusal to situate each incident in its historical context, which makes it all the easier to portray violent explosions as an anomaly.
Listening to Halsema, you would never know that the Amsterdam pogrom was preceded in March by a violent demonstration at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum, where pro-Hamas protestors masked with keffiyehs and brandishing Palestinian flags — this century’s
equivalent of a brown shirt and a Nazi armband — lobbed fireworks and eggs in protest at the presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
What you will realize, however, is that Halsema is terrified of being labeled “Islamophobic.” That explains her pleas for understanding for a bunch of Moroccan thugs who express contempt not just for Israel but for the country that has provided them a sanctuary with housing, education and many other benefits.
Not only are Jews expected to take all this abuse lying down; they are then told by non-Jewish leftist politicians — often aided by Jewish “anti-Zionist” lackeys — that they have no right to situate the violence directed against them within the continuum of Jewish persecution over the centuries. What happened in Amsterdam, we are badgered into believing, was different because it wasn’t motivated by hatred of Jews but a righteous rejection of Israeli policy.
That’s why the behavior of some of the Maccabi fans is brought into the equation. Video showing fans descending into a subway as they chanted “[Expletive] the Arabs” spread like wildfire on social-media platforms, along with reports that Palestinian flags adorning some private homes had been torn down.
I am not going to endorse these actions, even
if, as a Jew, I can understand and empathize with the feelings that motivated them, but I also consider them essentially irrelevant to this case.
The advance planning of the pogrom, coupled with the wretched record of pro-Hamas demonstrations around the Netherlands in the previous year, proves that the Maccabi fans would have been hounded and attacked even if their behavior had been impeccable. Moreover, legally and morally, violent assaults are in a different league than acts of petty vandalism or the singing of distasteful songs. There can be no comparison, and nor should there be.
What the Amsterdam pogrom underlines is that the extremes of the left and the unreconstructed elements of the nationalist right are now at one in their attitudes towards Jews.
On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.” Both terms carry the same meaning, but are expressed in language designed to appeal the prejudices of their respective supporters.
•For the left, claims of antisemitism are dismissed as expressions of Jews exercising their “privilege,” dishonestly seeking victim status at the same time as the “colonial” state they identify with is persecuting the “indigenous” inhabitants.
•For the right, claims of antisemitism are a tactic to shield the contention that Jews are superior to everyone else.
Translated, both communicate the same message: The violence you experience is violence you bring upon yourselves.
To her eternal shame, Halsema is now trafficking in this noxious idea while presiding over a city in which no Jew can now feel safe, less than a century after their ancestors were rounded up and deported by the German occupiers. She should resign.
Ben Cohen, a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column for JNS on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. To reach him, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
University curriculum: How to ‘unlearn Zionism’
Since the Hamas attack that began the Gaza war, universities have witnessed massive demonstrations against Israel. One factor behind the protests may be that students are following the lead of professors who exhibit hostility toward Israel and teach anti-Zionism.
In light of overwhelming support for Israel among Jews and their rejection of anti-Zionism as abhorrent, teaching that anti-Zionism is valid and advocating for it within a university’s Jewish studies program should be out of the question.
Yet such anti-Zionism advocacy is what we are witnessing at the University of San Francisco’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice. There is at least one professor, the program’s assistant director Oren Kroll-Zeldin, who teaches courses on the Israel-Palestine conflict and aims to assist students to “unlearn Zionism.”
Kroll-Zeldin’s approach is outlined his book, “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine.” His major point is that young anti-Zionist Jews who engage in “Palestine solidarity” do so as an expression of their Jewish identity. Importantly, the book reveals Kroll-Zeldin’s hostility to Israel.
Kroll-Zeldin does not write as a scholar of anti-Zionism; he presents the book as an “autoethnographic account” of his personal decade-and-a-half journey with “unlearning Zionism.”
As he says, “I write this book from the position of an embedded participant in the move-
ment. … In many ways, I saw the activists as a reflection of myself. … As I researched this community of activists, I became involved with some of the organizations they were part of.”
Kroll-Zeldin characterizes normative American Jewish teaching about Israel as “miseducation” and “indoctrination.” He also writes at length about how his extensive traditional Jewish education was a “process of Zionist indoctrination.”
Kroll-Zeldin writes about these Jewish youths more like stick figures than serious thinkers.
“Millennial and Gen Z Jews have different generational memories,” he says, than older Americans and know little about the Holocaust and the history of Israel. But, he says,
“they are also very familiar with Israel as an occupier and likely were exposed to media images or comments from friends that condemned Israel.”
He never inquires about their ignorance, nor does he even question their views given that ignorance. He just applauds their activism.
In his book, Kroll-Zeldin discusses how as an educator he challenges “the previously held views of my students to enable them to reimagine their connections to Israel, to ‘unlearn Zionism’ and to work in solidarity with Palestinians” in the struggle for justice.
“Unlearning Zionism,” he writes, “recognizes that the implementation of Zionism through a commitment to Jewish supremacy
in Israel is at odds with core Jewish values.”
Kroll-Zeldin characterizes, in positive social-justice terms, various anti-Zionist groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the BDS movement, which advocate the dismantling of Israel. To him, for example, BDS is a “nonviolent campaign for Palestinian rights,” with the goals of ending the “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” and promoting the “rights of Palestinian refugees to return” to live in Israel.
What is required, according to Kroll-Zeldin, is “at the very least, an immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territories occupied in 1967 in order to establish a Palestinian state there, thus ensuring Palestinian self-determination. They [the activists] understand this to be a pragmatic goal and a necessary steppingstone to a just, sustainable, and secure peace in the region.”
The phrase “stepping-stone,” in anti-Zionist terms, points to a subsequent step that would end Israel. This, he says, would be “an antidote to Zionism’s ethnonationalism” and “make Jews safer and to ensure Jewish survival.” He does not, however, describe his vision of how life will be safer for Jews without Israel.
Kroll-Zeldin never finds fault with Palestinians or Arab countries, nor does he ever reflect positively on Israel or mainstream American Jewish communal organizations.
He repeatedly condemns the “American Jewish establishment” — synagogues, Jewish federations, Jewish community centers, Jewish youth groups and political-advocacy organization, such as AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee — as “hypocritical because they emphasize the American and Jewish values of justice, equality and freedom yet do so quite selectively, denying them, for example, to Palestinians.”
LAWRENCE GROSSMAN
Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema in 2018. Gemeente Amsterdam via WikiCommons
A student holds a placard reading “Jews for Palestine” during a pro-Palestine student protest at the University of Nevada in Reno on May 8.
Kia Rastar, Middle East Images, AFP via Getty GLOBAL
‘Rolling Stone’ accuses my sons of war crimes
SHMULEY BOTEACH
Rolling Stone, a magazine once renowned for its solid investigative journalism, is planning to publish a reckless, unsubstantiated attack on two of my heroic sons serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Doing so is not just journalistic negligence but a grotesque blood libel and a nauseating, stomachturning display of antisemitism.
Rolling Stone is legitimizing the Hind Rajab Foundation, a minuscule joke of an organization that claims to represent Palestinian interests. The foundation, which has fewer than 1,000 followers on social media, filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, accusing Israeli soldiers of war crimes for, believe it or not, praying in Gaza. Yes, I know. It sounds like an “SNL” skit. But this is real. Its senior politics editor, Andrew Perez, is insisting on plowing ahead with this grotesque blood libel just to get a headline that says, “Rabbi Shmuley’s IDF sons accused of war crimes.” It makes no difference that Rolling Stone will pay with its very credibility once people read the actual story. The idea is to ruin my sons’ lives with a headline that will follow them forever since, studies show, 95% of people never read past the headline.
What is Perez’s motive? Why would he insist on a blood libel against two IDF soldiers? Well, in our lengthy phone conversation, it seemed that what bothered him most was how proud I am of my sons, who are serving in the first Jewish army in 2,000 years, ensuring that a second
Holocaust is an impossibility and posting photos of them to my global followers. Concerning the photos I posted of my sons, he actually said to me, “Can I ask you: Why do you post pictures of your sons in the IDF?” I answered, “Huh, come again? Is that a serious question? Only someone who believes the revolting, disgusting antisemitic lie that the IDF is a gang of Nazis would ask me such a ridiculous question. Why do I post them? Because they are saving Jewish and Arab lives. And I couldn’t be more proud of them!”
Based on the preposterous complaint from Hind Rajab Foundation, Rolling Stone is now presenting the act of prayer and a soldier spray-painting the words beit knesset, Hebrew for “synagogue,” as an offense worthy of criminal prosecution by the body established to punish perpetrators of genocide. Perez told me it constituted a war crime of damaging enemy property. I tried hard not to laugh. Not a tank shell. Not an airstrike. Not a missile strike. Not poison gas, like Syrian President Bashar Assad used against Arab children. But spray-painting the word synagogue.
It gets better.
Rolling Stone is amplifying the unjust criticism of Israeli soldiers made by an NGO with deep ties to Hezbollah as the head of the Hind Rajab Foundation, Dyab Abou Jahjah, is a Hezbollah terrorist who has publicly praised the group’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In a 2003 article in the New York Times, Jahjah claimed he had joined Hezbollah against Israel and declared, “I had some military training, I’m still very proud of that.” In a eulogy for Nasrallah, Jahjah claimed he met the Hezbollah leader in 2001.
Here is one of America’s most famous names in legacy media using an actual Hezbollah-
trained terrorist as a source to defame my sons for war crimes. That Rolling Stone has chosen to partner with an organization linked to Hezbollah raises serious questions about why Perez still has a job at the magazine when he has made a mockery of objectivity and any commitment to responsible journalism, let alone ethics and decency. What next? Will Perez use neo-Nazi David Duke as a source to say that Jews were responsible for the Wall Street crash of 1929?
The basis of the charge against my sons was a photo I posted of my son Mendy in a building where the spray-painted beit knesset could be seen. My other son was not even there.
The “journalist” sent by Perez to cover this story, Gabriel Schivone, is a freelancer who parrots the Hezbollah mouthpiece’s contention and cannot cite an article in the Geneva Convention that makes praying in a combat zone a war crime. When asked about the specifics of his slanderous allegations of war crimes, he could not even identify the building where the supposed transgression took place — yet the magazine intends to publish this baseless story that can endanger my sons’ lives.
Is the publication so desperate to malign Israel that it’s willing to disregard the safety of innocent American Israelis? Is Rolling Stone so desperate to defame my children to demonstrate that all Jews, even members of the clergy, are bloodthirsty psychopaths? The accusations against my sons — soldiers who are serving their country honorably — are defamatory and malicious. To accuse IDF soldiers of war crimes for praying in the Gaza Strip — a region where Hamas and other terrorist organizations have committed countless atrocities — is an insult to the memory of the actual victims of crimes against humanity.
This kind of reckless journalism endangers the lives of Jewish soldiers by making them targets for fanatical extremists. It is irresponsible and malicious. The publicizing of my sons’ names and likenesses, without any legitimate evidence of wrongdoing, mirrors the kind of incitement that has led to violence against Jews throughout history.
Sadly, this is not the first time a rabid antisemite has made my sons their target. When I debated Islamist Mohammad Hijab on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” show last year, he said he wanted to see my sons’ body bags, God forbid. The next day, he posted on X a picture of what seemed to be a wrapped-up body next to a shovel with the line: “Make sure that you apply the same discount to the funeral. Body bags for your terrorist IDF son Mindy [sic] promo code Human shield.”
Ihave fought for years against the scourge of global antisemitism, and I will not let this latest attack go unanswered. This is not my first rodeo. I have successfully sued media bigots before, and I intend to hold Rolling Stone accountable for the damage it seeks to inflict on my family. I plan to explore every legal avenue to block this smear campaign.
By enabling antisemites, Rolling Stone will become a malicious, global laughingstock — a magazine that is willing to pander to the enemies of Israel at the cost of truth and human decency. If it wants to restore its credibility, then it must walk back its decision to publish a defamatory piece and apologize for giving a platform to terrorists and their supporters. The world is watching, and history will judge accordingly. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of the World Values Network. To reach him, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Get ready for Huckabee to channel Golda Meir
MOSHE
When former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador-designate to Israel, appears at his Senate confirmation hearing, he’s sure to run into some harsh questions from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and other critics of Israel concerning some of his past comments about Palestinian Arab identity.
All Huckabee will need to do in response is quote Golda Meir.
In 2008, Huckabee said: “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian. You have Arabs and Persians. And there’s such complexity in that. But there’s really no such thing. That’s been a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”
And in 2015, he told the Washington Post: “The idea that they have a long history, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true.”
None of which is any different from what one of Israel’s most famous and beloved prime ministers said, repeatedly.
Golda Meir, prime minister and leader of its Socialist Labor Party, said in the London Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, that until very recently: “There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either Southern Syria, before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine, including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.”
That was not some one-off comment. Meir said it again and again. For example, here she is on the BBC’s “This Week” program in 1970 (the segment can be viewed on YouTube):
“What difference is there between Arabs who were on this side of the Jordan and the other side of the Jordan, Arabs in the east bank and the
— west of the border of the west bank? I mean, when were Palestinians born? What was all this area before the First World War? When Britain got the mandate over Palestine, what was ‘Palestine’ then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqi border.”
The interviewer then cut in: “You say there is no such thing as a Palestinian — ” Meir: “No, east and west bank was Palestine. I’m a Palestinian. From ’21 until ’48, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as ‘Jews and Arabs, and Palestinians.’ There were Jews and Arabs.”
She continued: I don’t say there are no Palestinians. But I say there is no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people. Of all the Palestin-
ians who live in Jordan, why have the Palestinians in the West Bank become more ‘Palestinians’ since the fifth of June ’67 than they were before? Why didn’t they set up a Palestinian country, in addition to Jordan? … They should have set up another, independent Palestine, and fought from there. They didn’t do that.
“They adopted the fact that they are in Jordan, they have adopted Jordanian citizens[hip]. They are the majority in Jordan, they are in parliament, they are in government. What has happened since then — why they have become more Palestinian-conscious since the war of ’67?”
The answer to the prime minister’s question (Why did Palestinian Arab identity suddenly emerge after 1967?) was delivered
succinctly by Huckabee: Palestinian identity was invented to serve as “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”
All serious historians and anthropologists know the truth. There is nothing about the Palestinian Arabs that genuinely distinguishes them from the Arabs in Jordan or Syria. They all speak the same language. They all have the same history and culture. Almost all of them have the same religion.
This is why, throughout history, they never demanded the creation of a separate “Palestinian” state. The region was occupied by fellow Muslims for many centuries — Turkish Muslims for 600 years, and Jordan and Egypt from 1949 to 1967. Yet these “Palestinians” never asked their fellow Muslims to set up a “Palestine.”
Meir alluded to the ironic fact that Jordan itself used to be called “Palestine” — that is, before the British arbitrarily sliced off the eastern 75% of the Palestine Mandate territory in 1922, barred Jews from the area and renamed it “Transjordan” (which was later shortened to “Jordan”). The people there were magically transformed from “Palestinians” to “Transjordanians” with one wave of a British wand. Isn’t it remarkable how today’s outspoken critics of colonialism have nothing to say about the British colonial decrees that arbitrarily redefined the meaning of Palestine and Palestinians?
It was only when modern-day Israel was established in 1948 that the Arabs began using the term “Palestine” as a way of attacking Israel’s legitimacy. And it was only in 1967 when Israel took over the areas where most of those Arabs reside that they began using the label “Palestinian” in earnest, actively trying to create out of thin air a distinct identity in the hope of delegitimizing and displacing Israel.
So Bernie Sanders better bring a large handkerchief with him to the hearings. He’s going to need it to wipe all the egg off his face when ambassador-designate Huckabee starts quoting Golda Meir to him.
To reach Moshe Phillips, write: Columnist@ TheJewishStar.com
Golda Meir at Kibbutz Shefayim in central Israel, on July 24, 1950. Théodore Brauner, National Photo Collection of Israel via WikiCommons
International system is broken beyond repair
The announcement by the International Criminal Court that it is issuing international arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant indicates that the bottom has fallen out of the international system.
The institutions formed in the wake of World War II to create and preserve a liberal, international rules-based order never worked the way they were supposed to work. But today, they are no longer simply feckless, corrupt and dysfunctional. They are malign and dangerous. Rather than advance freedom, human rights and life, they serve tyranny, terror and murder. The system is beyond repair.
In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis and Jews around the world were stunned to see the international response to the atrocities of the day. They expected the nations of the world to stand with Israel in revulsion and rejection of the Palestinian’s quest to annihilate the Jews. Instead, millions took to the streets of the West’s major cities marching in support of the Palestinian murderers, rapists and kidnappers who tortured, raped mutilated, immolated and murdered 1,200 Israelis that day and kidnapped 251 more.
After a couple of weeks of crocodile tears and declarations of solidarity with Israel, Western leaders began warning Israel not to commit war crimes, and demanding that it feed and care for the very people who had just committed a oneday Holocaust.
Jews from Tel Aviv to Berkeley to Sidney wondered aloud, “How have things come to this?”
On the face of things, it made no sense. But if we had paid closer attention in the decades leading up to Oct. 7, we would have recognized the pattern. Palestinians massacre as many Jews as they can get their hands on because the more Jews they murder, the more richly the international system rewards them.
Most observers choose Nov. 10, 1975, as the date the worldwide system began its decline from mere fecklessness to malignity. That day, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 that designated Zionism — the Jewish national liberation movement, and the foundation of Jewish peoplehood and Judaism for the past 4,000 years — a form of racism. It didn’t happen in a vacuum though. It was the culmination of a years-long process that saw Palestinian murderousness reach what was until then unprecedented depths of depravity, followed by the beginning of the UN system’s embrace of the Palestinians, and their goal of annihilating the Jewish state and its citizens.
Following the PLO’s massacres of children in Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot in 1974, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution legitimizing Palestinian terrorism. It then invited PLO terror chief Yasser Arafat to address the body. During his infamous “Gun and Olive Branch” speech in November 1974, Arafat threatened to continue his terror onslaught if the worldwide community failed to embrace his goal of destroying Israel. Shortly thereafter, the General Assembly passed a resolution giving the PLO observer status to the United Nations.
The following year, the PLO carried out two more sensational terrorist attacks. The UN General Assembly responded by passing Resolution 3379, and so declared Israel and its people illegitimate.
‘Anti-Americanism at heart of anti-Zionism’
Far from being a deviation from the norm, the international system’s decision to stand with Hamas and the Palestinians following Oct. 7 followed a half-century of precedent. The more Jews the Palestinians murder — and the more gruesomely they murder the Jews — the more support the Palestinians receive from the international system.
Arafat, his henchmen, heirs and state sponsors all understood two basic things. First, they understood that Europeans were tired of feeling guilty about their history of genocidal Jew-hatred. The Palestinians tapped into a deep-seated European desire for expiation for the crimes the continent committed against the Jews both during the Holocaust, as well as in the centuries of organized European persecution and murder of Jews that preceded it.
By accusing the Jews and their state of committing the crimes the Europeans had committed against the Jews (and that the Palestinians sought to continue committing against the Jews), the Palestinians permitted the Europeans to feel comfortable — even good — about their murderous past.
The second thing the Palestinians and their Soviet state sponsors realized was that by making Jew-hatred socially acceptable again, they would tear apart the West. The European embrace of the Palestinians against the Jews would drive a wedge between Europe and the United States. And that, in turn, would force the United States onto the defensive for its support for the Jewish state and its people.
In “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People,” Walter Russell Mead documented how American support for the Jewish state preceded the establishment of the modern-day state of Israel by nearly 200 years. It was borne of the founding fathers’ desire to form a New Jerusalem. The “Liberty” in which the United States was “conceived” was the liberty of the laws of Moses that mandated the establishment of limited government of man ruled by God’s Divine laws.
For those Americans, the re-establishment of the Jewish commonwealth in the Promised Land would be a fulfillment not only of God’s promise to the Jewish people but proof of the justness of the United States of America, which was modeled on that commonwealth.
The Soviets were convinced that by laundering Palestinian terrorist propaganda through the
The Soviets were convinced that by laundering Palestinian terrorist propaganda through the UN system, the Palestinian cause would weaken and divide the Western alliance.
UN system, the Palestinian cause would weaken and divide the Western alliance. Under pressure from Europeans and European-influenced American elite, anti-Zionism would undo America’s sense of its own morality and weaken its social cohesion to the point where Americans would be driven apart. Some would internalize the antiAmericanism at the heart of the anti-Zionism, and others would refuse to do so.
In short, Palestinian terrorism and its concomitant propaganda and political warfare made Jew-hatred socially acceptable again for Europeans; it engendered anti-Americanism in Europe and among the Eurocentric American elite, splitting American society apart.
From 1974 when the Palestinians were first rewarded for massacring Jews with observer status at the United Nations until 2024, when Israel’s war for survival against Palestinian mass murderers was declared a war crime and a crime against humanity by the ICC, the Palestinian cause of genocide gradually took over the UN system, and its associated agencies and satellite organizations like the UN Human Rights Council and the ICC. The only thing blocking its complete takeover and attendant moral and strategic destruction of the post-war system was America’s refusal to join in the fracas. In other words, the international system was perpetually just one change in US policy away from being devoured completely by Jewhatred.
Enter the Biden administration.
‘Hostile, unlawful acts against Israel’
Since Oct. 7, the outgoing Biden administration has been playing a game of footsie with the UN system. While paying lip service to Israel’s right to self-defense, President Joe Biden and his advisers have enabled and emboldened the world body and its agencies to side with Hamas by refusing at every turn to take any action against agencies siding with or aiding and abetting Hamas.
Consider UNRWA. On Oct. 7, UNRWA employees in Gaza participated in the atrocities. As the weeks and months passed, it became apparent that UNRWA was Hamas’s diplomatic and welfare arm. Its infrastructure was enmeshed in Hamas’s terror infrastructure. Its personnel were Hamas personnel. And this was by design.
UN Watch revealed last week that in 2017, then UNRWA head Pierre Krähenbühl met with Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror commanders in Beirut and pledged to work with them in full partnership. Krähenbühl, who now heads the International Committee for the Red Cross, emphasizes the “spirit of partnership” between UNRWA and the terrorist organizations. He urged them to keep the cooperation private to avoid angering UNRWA’s donors and endangering its funding.
Although the administration cut off funding to UNRWA after its employees’ involvement in the Oct. 7 atrocities was exposed, the US State Department has repeatedly extolled UNRWA,
promised to restore funding and threatened Israel with arms embargoes if it cuts off the UN’s in-house terror group. So the administration’s actual policy is to support UNRWA even as its terrorist activities have become undeniable.
Then there is the International Court of Justice. Two months after Oct. 7, the ICJ began to adjudicate South Africa’s allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the scandalous allegation, the ICJ agreed to hear the case. So today, Israel is on trial for the crimes Hamas and its supporters carried out against the State of Israel.
While decrying the trial, the Biden administration did nothing to intervene on Israel’s behalf with the ICJ. It placed no pressure on South Africa to withdraw its case.
By taking no action against the ICJ or South Africa, the Biden administration indirectly but clearly supported their decision to place Israel on the dock.
Last week, the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism revealed that the South African government and African National Congress (ANC) governing party are bankrolled by Hamas, and its state sponsors Iran and Qatar. So in effect, South Africa is acting as their agent. The actual party accusing Israel of genocide is Hamas, which actually continues its war of genocide still today.
Finally, we come to the International Criminal Court. For the past 15 years, the ICC has been working with Palestinian terrorists to build a legal fiction where Israel, which is not a member of the ICC and over whom the ICC has no jurisdiction is a terrorist organization; and the terror-infused, PLO-controlled, and Hamas aligned-Palestinian Authority is a sovereign state empowered to give the ICC jurisdiction over Israel.
Recognizing the threat the ICC posed not only to Israel but to the United States itself, during his first term, President-elect Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that required sanctions be imposed on ICC staff in the event the institution issued arrest warrants against US military personnel or US allies, including Israel. Upon entering office, Biden canceled the Executive Order. He refused to reissue it following ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s announcement last May that he intended to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. When the US House of Representatives passed a bill legislating the sanctions that appeared in Trump’s executive order, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) blocked it from being launched in the Senate.
Through its actions, the administration actively protected the ICC — and indirectly encouraged the ICC in its hostile, unlawful acts against Israel. And, just to be clear, the act in question is kidnapping. Netanyahu and Gallant have committed no war crimes and no atrocities. The ICC is acting without legal authority, outside the bounds of international law, with no evidence of any crime save claims from terrorists who are themselves war criminals. Its decision to issue international arrest warrants under the circumstances renders the ICC nothing more than a kidnapping ring. And every ICC member nation that agrees to execute the warrants is a member of the ring. By enabling the international system to escalate its war against Israel and its people, the Biden administration completed the process initiated 50 years ago at the United Nations. Although Biden and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have repeatedly protested their commitment to protecting the liberal world order, their actions in office have transformed the UN-based system into a mechanism for the advancement of the genocide of Jews and the destruction of the JudeoChristian civilization.
These institutions are now beyond repair. They cannot be reformed, only dismantled. To this end, Israel, the Jews and the world are lucky that Trump has the courage to clean up the mess his predecessor is leaving and dismantle the now-broken international system that is Biden’s legacy. Caroline Glick hosts the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS.org. To reach her, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
cArolIne glIck
Israel Hayom
Exterior of the Peace Palace in The Hague, the seat since 1946 of the International Court of Justice, in February 2012. Jeroen Bouman, ICJ
Tickets: Advance Registration $15 (at the door $20)
Advance Registration for students and senior citizens $10
Advance registration closes at 5 pm day of event.
Featuring performances by KolRam • The Shaarei Tikvah Choir
The Sha’ar Band • Cantors Cohen and Ehrlich
Continued from page 14
the last moment. Isaac, whether because of the trauma of that moment or because of the inhibiting effect of having a strong father, is a man whose emotions often lie too deep for words.
No wonder, then, that he loves Rebecca on the one hand, Esau on the other. What these two very different people have in common is that they are so unlike him. They are both brisk and actionoriented. Their “native hue of resolution” is not “sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought.” No wonder, too, that Rebecca hesitates before speaking to him.
Just before the episode of the blessing, another scene takes place, apparently unrelated to what follows. There is a famine in the land. Isaac and Rebecca are forced into temporary exile, as Abraham and Sarah had been twice before. On G-d’s instructions, they go to Gerar. There, just as Abraham had done, Isaac passes off his wife as his sister, afraid that he might be killed so that his wife could be taken into the royal harem. Something happens, however, to disclose the truth:
When Isaac had been there a long time, Abimelech king of the Philistines looked down from a window and saw Isaac caressing [metzachek] his wife Rebecca. Gen. 26:8
We tend to miss the significance of this scene.
It is the only one in which Isaac is the subject of the verb tz-ch-k. Yet this is the root of Isaac’s name — Yitzchak — meaning “he will laugh.” It is the one scene of intimacy between Isaac and Rebecca. It is the only episode in which Isaac, as it were, is true to his name. Yet it nearly brings disaster. Abimelech is furious that Isaac has been economical with the truth. It is the first of a series of disputes with the Philistines.
Did this reinforce Isaac’s belief that he could never relax? Did it confirm Rebecca’s belief that she could never be unequivocally intimate with her husband? Perhaps so, perhaps not. But Netziv’s point remains.
Rebecca felt unable to share with Isaac the oracle she had received before the twins’ birth and the doubts she had about Esau’s suitability for the blessing. Her inability to communicate led to the deception, which brought a whole series of tragedies in its wake, among them the fact that Jacob was forced to flee for his life, as well as the counter-deception perpetrated against him by his father-in-law Laban.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Torah is telling us that communication is vital, however hard it is. Rebecca acts at all times out of the highest of motives. She holds back from troubling Isaac out of respect for his inwardness and privacy. She does not want to disillusion him about Esau, the son he loves. She does not want to trouble him with her oracle, suggesting as it did that the two boys would be locked into a lifelong struggle. Yet the alternative — deception — is worse.
We have here a story of the tragedy of good intentions. Honesty and openness are at the heart of strong relationships. Whatever our fears and trepidations, it is better to speak the truth than practice even the most noble deception.
Freedman…
Continued from page 15
And in describing the generations of Esau (Genesis 36), the Torah takes the time to tell us that the Kings of Edom ruled the land of Seir long before any Jewish king ruled in Israel. In other words, Esau too received his blessing — and sooner than Yaakov!
We love to view the world through black and white lenses — good guys vs. bad guys, the Lone Ranger with the white hat fighting all the villains in black. But life is not black and white, it is nuanced.
Back in the beginning, Hashem chooses Abel’s offering, which leads Cain to hate him and ultimately kill him. And when Yaakov chooses Rachel as his beloved wife, Leah feels hated, which certainly plays a role in the brothers’ hatred of Joseph and the disaster that ensues.
Perhaps the Torah is telling us that just because Yaakov is chosen, it does not mean that Esau is not
loved. Even though Rivkah has been told by G-d that Yaakov will be the chosen one, Yitzchak still loves Esau. Is Yitzchak really blind to Esau’s shortcomings? Does he not sense the contempt that Esau feels for the birthright and for Jewish ethical tradition, alluded to by his selling of the birthright (read responsibility?) for a pot of soup?
But then, how should one treat the wayward son? How to relate to the child who is not destined to be the leader, the chosen one? Love him. And if he resists, love him even more!
In truth, we are all chosen; because we are all created by G-d, in his image. To be chosen does not mean that one is better; it just means we are chosen for something.
Every one of us is created for a purpose and a mission. Our challenge is to discover what that mission is. And this is not only true for individuals; it is true for nations as well. Hashem created every nation; and each nation has a purpose and a mission, just as we have ours.
When we speak of ourselves as a “chosen nation,” it simply means we have a mission that the world needs us to fulfill, a purpose for which we were created and for which we still here. Every nation, like every human being, was created by G-d, so every nation and every human being is chosen; the only question is what they are chosen for
Four thousand years ago, Yitzchak is basically telling Yaakov and Esau: Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Be who you are meant to be.
The Jewish people have never believed it is all about us: our dream is that one day the whole world will be one and that every human being will be seen as having been created in the image of G-d. That is why when Jews long to pray on the Temple mount, they do not wish to do so instead of our Muslim cousins, but rather alongside them.
As we read at the end of the Musaf prayers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur:“Ki beiti beit tefillah yikareh le’chol ha’amim” (“One day, My House will be called a House of Prayer for all nations”).
We are waiting for the day when our cousins will share that dream. Until then, while we cannot accept the action of hate, and must fight them with all the tools at our disposal, we should never stop loving the people with whom we share this earth.
Perhaps one day, with enough love, we will yet experience the rapprochement of the burial of Avraham, when Yitzchak and Yishmael are finally able to put aside their differences and honor their father together.
Rabbi Freedman is rosh yeshiva at Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem. To reach him, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Weinreb…
Continued from page 15
I must add that Rambam distinguishes between two types of sinful temptations. However, the eighteenth-century sage Rabbi Yaakov Emden in his gloss upon the “Eight Chapters” (to be found in the appendix to the tractate Avodah Zara in the standard Vilna edition of the Babylonian Talmud) supersedes Rambam’s distinctions and simply declares “lefum tzaara agra,” the more difficulty a person faces when he tries to act properly, the more the reward for overcoming those difficulties.
After reviewing and explicating Rambam’s thesis and Rabbi Emden’s perspective, Rabbi Salant returns to our quandary: What was Yitzchak thinking when he favored Esav? What was the motive of his preference for the “cunning hunter” over and above the simple and straightforward Yaakov?
Yitzchak, suggest Rabbi Salant, was aware of the theological question which was the focus of Rambam’s treatise. He knew full well that Yaakov was a “pure soul,” and Esav had many “hunting” urges of all sorts. But he saw Esav’s life choices as attempts to channel his urges in a positive direction.
He is the model of the Talmud’s analogy of a person who is born under the constellation of Mars, the epitome of bloody warfare, in modern terms the genetically wired man of violence, who can sublimate his dark inner passions by choosing to be a shochet or a surgeon who sheds blood but as part of medical operation, or a mohel who sheds blood for the mitzvah of circumcision (see
Masechet Shabbat, 156a).
Yitzchak interpreted Esav’s hunting as his struggle to channel his urges toward violence into the hunt for delicious food for his aging and blind father. From that vantage point, Yaakov took second place. He was thoroughly good and knew no wayward temptations. Fine. But Esav, from Yitzchak’s perspective, stood even higher because of his internal struggles.
I leave it to you, dear reader, to ponder Rabbi Salant’s ingenious interpretation of Yitzchak’s love for Esav and to decide for yourself whether Yitzchak the parent understood his favorite son.
To reach Rabbi Weinreb, write: Columnist@ TheJewishStar.com
Billet…
Continued from page 15
feel rage and hate, but what do they do with it?
Bad people turn to violence as their outlet.
The two most difficult tensions in the parsha were eventually resolved with Avimelekh saying, “We see G-d is with you,” and through Yaakov and Eisav having a separation of time — more than 36 years — during which feelings relaxed. (Though it should be noted that when Yaakov and Eisav reunite in Vayishlach, Yitzchak is still alive.)
If Eisav had been G-d-fearing, he would have been honest about the blessing. In all the time since the sale — which had taken place almost 50 years prior to the blessing! — he never accepted his new reality, instead allowing his emotion, and ultimately his rage, rule his day.
He couldn’t express gratitude, because he couldn’t be honest with himself about what the people around him were doing — freeing him from responsibility and giving him a chance at the life he needed to live — life of being a free spirit not bound to time and place.
When we are G-d-fearing, we don’t let our emotion overtake how we respond to others. When we realize that our raw feelings are overtaking us, we need to give time a chance to heal us, to set things aright, to help us see the bigger picture.
Time doesn’t heal everything, but it helps us move on. And hopefully, with time, we can put our anger aside and find that those we carry grudges against also want to move on, not having to live or finish a life with regret over a relationship that at some point soured.
Avi Billet, who grew up in the Five Towns, is a South Florida-based mohel and rabbi of Anshei Chesed Congregation in Boynton Beach. This column was previously published. To reach Rabbi Billet, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Nazi thugs created an antisemitic regime in Germany.
Americans, he wrote, had enabled “the democratic election of an authoritarian figure, the normalization of bigotry,” and that this was down with “the complicity of the frightened masses.”
To write about the re-election of a pro-Israel politician who had done more to combat antisemitism on college campuses in his first term than any of his predecessors in this manner is an outrageous slander. But to do so 13 months after Oct. 7 — while 101 men, women and children are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip and Jews are being murdered elsewhere — is indicative of the tunnel vision of liberal Americans, including Jews like Grey who are unwilling to think clearly about what constitutes the main threat to Jewish security in the 21st century.
Rather than face up to the reality of left-wing antisemitism masquerading as “pro-Palestinian” activism, they prefer to recycle conspiracy theories and fearmongering about their partisan foes. In such an intellectual atmosphere in academia and the arts, it’s hardly surprising that the legacy media is whitewashing Jew-haters on campus and urging that universities go easy on them.
Real crackdown needed
The irony to this is that it is exactly Trump’s election win that provides the best hope for effective action against campus antisemitism. He promised a real crackdown, involving cutting off funding for universities that tolerate pro-Hamas mobs intimidating Jewish students and deporting those foreign students (many of whom come from the Arab and Muslim worlds) who take part in pro-Hamas, pro-terror activities. Those who truly care about Jewish security should hope that Trump keeps this promise in the same manner as the way he kept his vow to move the US embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in his first term. Given the pro-Israel and philo-semitic beliefs of his cabinet appointments for his second term, there’s every reason to hope that this will happen.
That’s a plan of action that will not only help American Jews. There’s good reason to believe that the Trump 2.0 Department of Justice will begin action to target those institutions that engage in racial discrimination in the name of DEI policies, rather than enabling it as it did under the Biden and Obama administrations. If so, the result will be a much needed turning of the tide that will roll back the leftist takeover of education that helped exacerbate racial, ethnic and religious division. Rather than worrying about repressing antisemites on campus, people of goodwill — whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Jewish or non-Jewish — should applaud the justified punishment of those who have mainstreamed and normalized antisemitism since Oct. 7. Those who oppose such measures are defending hate, not free speech.
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the river to the sea”).
Campus buildings were taken over and other public spaces were allowed to be turned into encampments, effectively making it difficult, if not impossible, for students who understandably worried for their safety to challenge crowds voicing support for the slaughter of Jews and sometimes to even get to their classes.
But we are now being told that the effort to curb this scourge is itself the problem.
Fearing Trump, not antisemites
That’s hardly surprising since the chattering classes are still largely blind to the way their embrace of woke ideology — and hostility to Israel and its right to defend itself against genocidal terrorist — has unleashed an unprecedented increase in American antisemitism. Indeed, outlets like the Times are still promoting the idea that the victory of President-elect Donald Trump in the presidential election represents the real threat of a revival of Nazi-like authoritarianism.
The day before it published its article about the supposedly deplorable “crackdown” against Hamas, the Times ran an article authored by Joel Grey, who played the emcee in the 1966 original Broadway production of the musical “Cabaret” and the 1972 film version. The 92-year-old actor/singer analogized the election results to the events depicted in the play, whereby the rise of
To reach Jonathan S. Tobin, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Tobin… Grossman…
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It is now common among academics to condemn Israel for racism, apartheid, occupation, genocide and settler colonialism. Given the massive anti-Israel demonstrations over the past year, Kroll-Zeldin may be representative of a widespread phenomenon.
There is, finally, the irony that Kroll-Zeldin teaches in the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. The program was established in 1977 as the “Swig Judaic Studies Program,” with an endowment from philanthropist Melvin Swig and the goal of bringing a Jewish perspective to a Catholic university.
Swig served as the chair of the board of the University of San Francisco and president of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Israel and also served on boards of national American Jewish organizations.
Swig was precisely the type of Jewish leader that Kroll-Zeldin condemns in his work.
Lawrence Grossman is a semi-retired financial adviser. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
We are Jews. We are Zionists.
We are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. Zionism is our national liberation movement.
Seventh Step outside the Machpelah. For 700 years, before Hebron was liberated, that’s as close as Jews got to this holy site, where our matriarchs and patriarchs are buried.
